Evaluation of social responsibility projects with organizational impact on business: A Brazilian case study

Abstract

This paper was prepared in order to present social projects to be executed in a Brazilian organization. Such projects are socially responsible and were analyzed to determine which have had higher impact on business-related performance indicators, as well as the return that refers to the organization sustainability and increased competitive advantage. The study was conducted based on the causal loop diagram, as part of system dynamics studies. The team responsible for implementing the scheme held the relation of cause-effect relationship between performance indicators and indicators of social responsibility among the social projects and the indicators of social responsibility. Team members were chosen by the executive director and coordinator of social organization, which resulted in the selection of five staff, to verify the validity of the systematic selection of projects of social responsibility, which positively impacted the performance indicators for the organization. The results indicated that out of 25 projects examined, 16 are considered to be social responsibility projects. From these 16, five projects have greater impact on performance indicators related to business, return of sustainability, and increased competitive advantage. The application of the model made it possible to reveal the influence that social projects may have on indicators. Key words: Social responsibility, indicators, social projects, business, sustainability. INTRODUCTION The practice of social responsibility is considered to be part of organizations’ intangible assets (Cramer et al., 2004; Fuller and Tian, 2006; Whitehouse, 2006; Waddock, 2008; Heijden et al., 2010; Shyh-Rong et al., 2010). For this nature, consistent, but extremely quantitative results are yet difficult to come by, especially in the analysis of the relationship of its impact upon performance indicators. This is due to the fact that such results are not directly measurable among the set of