IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jomorg/v16y2010i01p48-65_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Exploring Australian financial leaders' views of corporate social responsibility

Author

Listed:
  • Lindorff, Margaret
  • Peck, James

Abstract

This paper reports an exploratory and qualitative study of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) beliefs of leaders of large Australian financial institutions. The findings are presented in four sections. The first discusses whether leaders have a mental model of the firm that is most closely aligned with the traditional shareholder or the stakeholder view of the firm. It then examines how they frame the organization's responsibilities, particularly as they relate to balancing the needs of shareholders and other stakeholders. The third section identifies how they view CSR and the fulfilment of potential economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities of organizations. The final section examines the driving factors that lead to their promotion of corporate social responsibility. We find that although many leaders support the wealth creation model's central premise that the organization's primary responsibility is to maximise its value in order to meet its fiduciary obligations to its shareholders, they also believe that CSR activities benefit the organization financially and in building corporate sustainability, employee engagement and performance, and social capital. CSR activities are also believed to increase the legitimacy of the organization, although philanthropy is not supported unless there is a business case. This has implications for those seeking support from organizations for community causes. We also find the view of employees as primary stakeholders is strong and widespread; an implication of this is that employee influence is a strong lever for positive change towards CSR behaviour in a firm.

Suggested Citation

  • Lindorff, Margaret & Peck, James, 2010. "Exploring Australian financial leaders' views of corporate social responsibility," Journal of Management & Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 16(1), pages 48-65, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jomorg:v:16:y:2010:i:01:p:48-65_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1833367200002261/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Satu Pätäri & Ari Jantunen & Kalevi Kyläheiko & Jaana Sandström, 2012. "Does Sustainable Development Foster Value Creation? Empirical Evidence from the Global Energy Industry," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 19(6), pages 317-326, November.
    2. Kellie Liket & Ana Simaens, 2015. "Battling the Devolution in the Research on Corporate Philanthropy," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 126(2), pages 285-308, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jomorg:v:16:y:2010:i:01:p:48-65_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jmo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.