Effect of Personal Characteristics on Social Accounting Initiatives: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

The research works with two separate but closely connected themes of individual employee behavior and organization-wide initiatives that are further broken down into two dimensions of Social Entrepreneurship Profile and Social Accounting (SA). This research study seeks to identify the social entrepreneurship profile that highlights the specific personal characteristics of employees working in an organization; secondly, it attempts to understand how the broader initiatives that help today’s organizations become more socially responsible. Factors covered in Personal Characteristics included: 1. Sociality, 2. Innovativeness, 3. Market-orientation, and 4. The ability to Identifying New Opportunities (INO). Social Accounting Initiatives included Internal Attitude (IA), and Subjective norms (SN), each is classified as: 1.Pragmatic, 2. Moral, and 3. Cognitive, as well as Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC). For this purpose, A survey was conducted of 75 firms, and their decision-makers 306. were surveyed about their characteristics as well as the social accounting initiatives in their firms, using a close-ended questionnaire. A total of 306 decision-makers was surveyed about four employees per organization. Dataset was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The results suggested that innovativeness and INO seem to have a positive and significant impact on pragmatic and moral IA. As well as moral SN. Similarly, sociality and innovativeness positively affecting moral IA. Sociality also seems to be affecting moral IA, pragmatic SN, and PBC, however, it has a negative impact on cognitive SN. Market orientation also has a significant positive impact on cognitive IA and SN. Lastly, INO seems to affect Perceived Behavioral Control. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed