What Dimension of CSR Matters to Organizational Resilience? Evidence from China

Abstract

Prior work on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has focused mainly on its effects on the short-term performance of firms from developed countries. In this article, we shed light on its effects on organizational resilience, which is defined as the firm’s ability to positively cope with environmental turbulence, and operationalized by long-term, improved sales growth and financial volatility. In line with this operationalization, we adopt CSR’s performance-enhancing and performance-insuring mechanisms to disentangle the relationship between CSR and organizational resilience. Furthermore, we divide CSR into five dimensions, namely shareholder, employee, business, society and environment-related CSR, and respectively examine their impacts on organizational resilience. The empirical study on a large sample of public firms in China from 2010 to 2017 shows that CSR as a whole significantly increases the firms’ long-term growth and reduces their financial volatility. As for the five specific dimensions, they all have a significant negative effect on financial volatility, and the employee, business, environment-related CSR are positively associated with long-term growth. Yet, the empirical results did not indicate significant associations between shareholder and society-related CSR and firms’ long-term growth. This study first explores the impacts of CSR’s different dimensions on organizational resilience. Also, we contribute to enriching the literature on CSR by examining the long-term performance-insuring effect of CSR with a quantitative analysis of emerging markets. Finally, we discuss some important managerial implications, as well as promising directions for future research.