The Corporate Social Performance - - Financial Performance Link

Strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them. Recent scholarship in strategic management suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management, rather than traditional arenas of strategic management. Using a greatly-improved source of data on corporate social performance, this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance. CSP is found to be positively associated with prior financial performance, supporting the theory that slack resource availability and CSP are positively related. CSP is also found to be positively associated with future financial performance, supporting the theory that good management and CSP are positively related. Post-print version of an article published in Strategic Management Journal 18(4): 303-319 (1997 April). doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199704)18:4<303::AID-SMJ869>3.0.CO;2-G