Do Business Environmental Prospects Affect the Implementation of CSR in Foreign Markets?: The Moderating Effect

Abstract

This paper focuses on the perception of business environment crisis on Korean subsidiaries’ CSR performance in Chinese market. According to the empirical analysis, the higher the perception of crisis on the local business environment, the lower the level of CSR activities. These results indicate that overseas subsidiaries determine the CSR level according to the situation of the market environment rather than philanthropic motives. This is because CSR implementation of foreign subsidiaries is more like strategic motivation than moral motivation. In particular, if resources are limited, such as overseas subsidiaries, it will be burdensome to implement CSR, which is difficult to achieve in the short term. Moreover, we examined the moderating effects of primary stakeholders such as local consumers, employees, and suppliers through additional analysis. The higher the reputation of local consumers and the competitiveness of partner companies, the weaker the impact of crisis perception on CSR, but the ratio of local employees did not have a significant effect.