Socially responsible human resource policies and practices: Academic and professional validation

Abstract

This article addresses the measurement and validation of socially responsible human resource policies from academic and professional points of view. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has made great progress in recent years in the theoretical realm, showing its importance through different perspectives such as the institutional theory, the stakeholder approach, the theory of legitimacy, and the process of shared value. However, from an empirical standpoint, more research is needed to provide new indicators and evidence of testing socially responsible policies on business performance. This paper aims to devise a set of socially responsible human resource policies, demonstrate the validation of their content through several practices, and review the analysis of their relative weights thanks to the contribution of a panel of academic experts and a professional pretest, conducted in large Spanish companies.