Corporate Social Responsibility in the Telecommunication Industry—Driver of Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Beyond the conventional understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a voluntary obligation for promoting triple-bottom-line CSR, development-oriented CSR is emerging and requires empirical investigation. This organisation-level research fills this gap by exploring development-oriented CSR as a driver of entrepreneurship in Nigeria. Arising from the review of the literature, human capital theory and stakeholder theory provided theoretical groundings for the study. The empirical study provides an enhanced understanding of development-oriented CSR that incorporates entrepreneurship into the extant literature. The target comprised multiple stakeholders in the Nigerian telecommunication industry, from which a sample of 369 responses were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The five tested hypotheses showed mixed results. The stakeholder management and economic dimensions of development-oriented CSR were found to have significant positive effects on entrepreneurship. However, the environmental, national, and social dimensions do not have significant positive effects on entrepreneurship. Overall, it was found that development-oriented CSR is a potential driver of entrepreneurship in the Nigerian telecommunication industry, but the predictability is weak (15%). The study concludes with practical implications and recommendations for further research in this multidisciplinary field.