Corporate social responsibility drivers and barriers according to managers' perception; Evidence from Spanish firms

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is becoming a dominant issue in both research and practice of management. However, the underlying processes in the relationship between the degree of development of CSR in companies and the drivers/barriers that determine this development are still at the center of an intense debate. The purpose of this empirical study is to examine these relationships. We investigate a sample of 416 Spanish firms; based on a multifactorial framework, our study considers both the subjective and objective drivers/barriers, analyzing their joint effect on the final degree of sustainability. A structural equation model is established and a Bayesian approach is used, enabling exact inferences about the model's parameters and handling missing data with random imputation, thus increasing the study's reliability. The results show that this degree is related to what managers believe CSR to be (subjective drivers/barriers) and what managers expect it to accomplish or outcomes (objective drivers/barriers).