Does Corporate Social Responsibility Influence Firms Performance in Nigeria?

Abstract

Social responsibility disclosure has become a widely and persistent debated topic of discussion in the Nigerian academic community given the effects that business activities have on environment, employees, communities, clients, society, business associates and shareholders. The global economic challenges have hindered effective operations by the deposit money banks thereby reducing their operational performance. It is against this backdrop that this study examined the effect of social responsibility disclosure and firm performance in Nigeria. Social responsibility disclosure as the explanatory variables was proxied by environmental disclosure, governance disclosure, human resources disclosure and community disclosure while the response variable is the firm performance. sampling technique was adopted by the reviewed studies. A mixed approach of data was used (primary and secondary sources of data were extracted from both questionnaires and the annual report and accounts from various studies. Theory and hypotheses were adopted and multiple regressions was used to analyze the data. Based on the reviewed studies, it was established that environmental disclosure and human resources disclosure have insignificant effect on the firm performance, while the governance disclosure has a significant effect on firm performance. The community disclosure is positive and insignificant influencing firm performance. It is recommended among others that companies should engage the specialty on environment reporting to reduce the performance on the firms. Also, firms should improve by participating in community services to better disclosure the community activities and maintain the current governance disclosure level because this has been found empirically to increase the firm performance.