مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکت و قدرت مدیر عامل اجرایی
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Literature review and hypothesis development
3- Research design
4- Main results
5- Additional tests
6- Conclusion
References
Abstract
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) power on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance.
Design/methodology/approach - The authors use regression analysis to investigate the research question.
Findings - Using a 23-year panel sample with 1,574 unique US firms and 8,575 firm-year observations, the authors find a significant and negative relation between CEO power and CSR, suggesting that firms with more powerful CEOs engage in less CSR activities.
Originality/value - The results reveal that more powerful CEOs become less responsive to the needs of stakeholder groups, confirming the validity of the stakeholder theory of CSR.
Introduction
Chief executive officer (CEO) power has recently received much attention in finance research. Much of the prior research has examined the impact of powerful CEOs on firms’ performance and outcomes. For example, studies find that CEO power is negatively related to market value and accounting performance of a firm (Bebchuk et al., 2011), bond credit ratings (Liu and Jiraporn, 2010), leverage ( Jiraporn et al., 2012), firm productivity (Cronqvist et al., 2009), the use of relative performance evaluation (Dikolli et al., 2014) and the informativeness of stock prices (Withisuphakorn and Jiraporn, 2015). The above research suggests that more CEO power leads to more agency and governance problems. Despite the surge of attention on the importance of powerful CEOs on firms’ performance and outcomes, there is surprisingly little evidence on how powerful CEOs influence corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has become an important corporate decision-making component. As the fundamental theory of CSR, the stakeholder theory argues that firms have multiple stakeholder groups including customers, suppliers, employees, community groups, investors and government agencies. The proper goal of managers is to meet or satisfy the objectives of these different stakeholder groups simultaneously. Hence, managers, especially CEOs, play an important role in the process of balancing and addressing the objectives of different stakeholder groups (Freeman and Evan, 1990; Donaldson and Preston, 1995; Jones, 1995; Pirson and Malhotra, 2011). However, when CEOs become more powerful, we argue that these CEOs are less likely to engage in CSR activities because they are more likely to take actions to maximize their own interests such as maintaining or even increasing their power at the expenses of stakeholders including shareholders (Bebchuk et al., 2011). Therefore, we posit a negative relation between CEO power and CSR.