The Effects of CSR Activities on Firms�� Financial Performance : Investigating in terms of CSR Development Stages

Abstract

This paper investigates how the way a company designs and implements its CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) activities influence CSR performance. It focuses on the presence of an exclusive CSR team in firms to examine the effect of CSR implementation process on firm’s financial performance. The way of building a team can reflect how a company designs and carries out CSR programs in organizations. There seems to be little attention on investigating the effect of CSR in terms of CSR implementation and development stages in organizations so far. This study employs the concepts of CSR development stages and the theory on the relationship between job characteristics and employees’ performance. The result shows that the CSR’s effect on financial performance is greater when the CSR implementation is more developed in an organization; the effects of CSR activities are greater with an exclusive CSR team than without it. Firms’ supports for CSR enable developing the concept of CSR and building an exclusive CSR team. The members of CSR team perceive their job characteristics more clearly after belonging to a team, which facilitates improvement of the employees, and consequently firms’ performance.