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No CPR for CSR: A Call to Abandon Search for the “Holy Grail”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2015

Ramon J. Aldag
Ramon J. Aldag*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
*
E-mail: raldag@bus.wisc.edu, Address: Glen A. Skillrud Family Chair in Business, Department of Management and Human Resources, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 3112 Grainger Hall, 975 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706-1323
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Extract

Aguinis and Glavas (2013) offer a new attempt to explain the consistently weak but consistently inconsistent findings regarding the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to financial performance. Like many others writing in the field, Aguinis and Glavas appear to believe that further efforts to categorize types of CSR will somehow identify CSR forms that are financially rewarding. In this response, I challenge four assumptions underlying the Aguinis and Glavas manuscript: (a) that CSR has received little attention in the micro literature; (b) that CSR can be meaningfully conceptualized and operationalized; (c) that a continued search for the “holy grail” of a CSR–financial performance link is likely to be fruitful; and (d) that the “peripheral–embedded” distinction is useful and appropriate.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 372 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2013

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