Firms engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) because they consider that some kind of competitive advantage accrues to them. We contend that resource-based perspectives (RBP) are useful to understand why firms engage in CSR activities and disclosure. From a resource-based perspective CSR is seen as providing internal or external benefits, or both. Investments in socially responsible activities may have internal benefits by helping a firm to develop new resources and capabilities which are related namely to know-how and corporate culture. In effect, investing in social responsibility activities and disclosure has important consequences on the creation or depletion of fundamental intangible resources, namely those associated with employees. The external benefits of CSR are related to its effect on corporate reputation. Corporate reputation can be understood as a fundamental intangible resource which can be created or depleted as a consequence of the decisions to engage or not in social responsibility activities and disclosure. Firms with good social responsibility reputation may improve relations with external actors. They may also attract better employees or increase current employees’ motivation, morale, commitment and loyalty to the firm. This article contributes to the understanding of why CSR may be seen as having strategic value for firms and how RBP can be used in such endeavour.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Resource-Based Perspectives

This article explores how the diversity of board resources and the number of women on boards affect firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings, and how, in turn, CSR influences corporate reputation. In addition, this article examines whether CSR ratings mediate the relationships among board resource diversity, gender composition, and corporate reputation. The OLS regression results using lagged data for independent and control variables were statistically significant for the gender composition hypotheses, but not for the resource diversity-based hypotheses. CSR ratings had a positive impact on reputation and mediated the relationship between the number of women on the board and corporate reputation.

The Impact of Board Diversity and Gender Composition on Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Reputation

One important question in the field of workplace spirituality concerns the relationship of this construct with employee work attitudes. This study attempts to make a rigorous empirical examination of the relationship between workplace spirituality and five prevalent employee job attitudinal variables. It assesses the validity and reliability of the measures used and discusses the results of the analysis, which indicate that each of the three dimensions of spirituality used has a significant relationship with two or more of the five job attitude variables examined. While acknowledging that spirituality at work is an abstract concept, this study attempts to provide some of the first empirical support that there is a positive association between spirituality at work and employee job outcomes. The paper concludes with a number of implications and research directions for both academics and business managers, including the need to investigate the comprehensive impact of spirituality at work on individuals and organizations.

Workplace spirituality and employee work attitudes: An exploratory empirical assessment

This paper reviews the literature on corporate social performance (CSP) measurement and sets that literature into a theoretical context. Following a review of CSP theory development and the literature on relationships between CSP and corporate financial performance, Wood’s CSP model (Wood, D.J. (1991). Corporate social performance revisited. Academy of Management Review, 16, pp. 691‐718) is used as an organizing device to present and discuss studies that use particular measures of CSP. Conclusions emphasize the need for CSP scholars to refocus on stakeholders and society, and to incorporate relevant literatures from other scholarly domains. Corporate social performance (CSP) and its sister concepts – corporate social responsibility, corporate social responsiveness, corporate citizenship – have been present in management scholarship for about 45 years. Notwithstanding this longevity, the CSP domain has remained controversial, fluid, ambiguous and difficult to research. To a large extent, CSP has been equated with ‘doing good’, and the search has been on for a statistical relationship between CSP and financial performance (FP) so as to justify or delegitimize the normative calls for managers to pay attention to CSP. These two phenomena may be largely to blame for the lack of progress in CSP theory and measurement. It is possible, and I believe desirable, to take a different stance on CSP. Corporate social performance, as conceived in the Wood (1991) framework, is a set of descriptive categorizations of business activity, focusing on the impacts and outcomes for society, stakeholders and the firm itself. Types of relevant outcomes are determined by the firm’s linkages, both general and specific, as defined by the structural principles of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The production, monitoring, evaluation, compensation and rectification (or not) of these outcomes are defined by the processes of corporate social responsiveness – the boundary-spanning (or bridging) processes by which the firm connects itself to information, stakeholders and issues. All these elements can be measured and evaluated: impacts and outcomes; processes; and the specific guidance offered by structural principles. The aim of this paper is, first, to describe briefly the conceptual history of CSP and then to explain CSP as a set of structural categories that can be identified, described and measured (following Wood 1991 and modifications by Kang 1995; Swanson 1995, 1999; and Mitnick 1993, 1995, 2000). A ‘detour’ into CSP–FP research emphasizes how much attention has been paid to this aspect of the CSP domain and suggests that other research questions might now be more interesting. The paper then reviews the empirical literature in which some aspect of CSP is measured, showing how the measures themselves fit into an expanded structural CSP model. An additional result of this analysis will be to spotlight the aspects of CSP that have gone relatively (or completely) unexamined, or that have not yet been considered generally as indicators of CSP. Finally, the analysis will suggest some overarching conclusions about existing CSP research which suggest fruitful paths for future work.

Measuring Corporate Social Performance: A Review

A growing number of studies have investigated the various dimensions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the literature. However, relatively few studies have considered its impacts on employees. The purpose of this study is to analyze how CSR affects the organizational commitment of employees based on the social identity theory (SIT). The proposed model was tested on a sample of 269 business professionals working in Turkey. The findings of the study revealed that CSR to social and non-social stakeholders, employees, and customers were the significant predictors of organizational commitment. However, there was no link between CSR to government and the commitment level of employees.

How Corporate Social Responsibility Influences Organizational Commitment

Corporate image is a function of organizational signals which determine the perceptions of various stakeholders regarding the actions of an organization Because of its relationship to the actions of an organization, image has been studied as an indicator of the social performance of the organization Recent research has determined that social performance has direct effects on the behaviors and attitudes of the organization's employees To better understand these effects, this study develops and empirically tests a model which links corporate leaders' actions, employees' perceptions of corporate image, and the employees' level of association with the organization The effects of managing the social environment of an organization on its employees' perceptions of image, attitudes, and intended behaviors are discussed

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/25072907

Jodi Barnes Bill

Papers

Corporate image: Employee reactions and implications for managing corporate social performance