The Influence of Employees’ Ethical Behavior on Enterprises’ Social Responsibility

Abstract

The enterprises’ social responsibility (CSR) importantly depends upon behavior and its important factors like values, culture, ethics and norms. This article investigates how employees’ ethical behavior defines CSR. Article includes a comprehensive literature review, and empirical results of survey about employees’ perception of ethical behavior and relations between employees’ ethical attitudes and CSR. Sample consists of more than 900 employees in Slovenian enterprises, collected in last decade. Trends about employee’s perceptions of ethical, economic, environmental, and social attitudes, show increasing importance of ethical and environmental attitudes, and decreasing importance of striving for economic performance. Social attitudes remain unchanged over the entire decade. Employees’ ethical perceptions positively and significantly impact their attitudes toward social and environmental concerns. Their impact on attitudes toward giving priority to economic results is negative and significant. The considered relations were controlled by demographic variables mediating the relationship only for economic concern. Results of trends and relations confirm the significant influence of employees’ ethical behavior on CSR. The developed solution enables improvement of CSR considering importance of influences of employees’ ethical attitudes on aspects of CSR. The proposed solution reduces unexplained part of CSR related to ethical behavior and develops requisitely holistic methodological framework for future consideration of other behavior factors in enterprise.