Corporate social responsibility: from the company to the individual. A study on ethics inside portuguese companies

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Cláudia Granada
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/2898
• topic: Corporate social responsibility (CSR); Individual ethics; Stakeholders; Ethical acceptability; Responsabilidade Social das Organizações (RSO); Ética individual; Aceitabilidade ética

The present research attempts to explore the multi-dimensional nature of corporate social responsibility (CSR), further understand how a perceived CSR context is associated with the individual ethical judgement of organizational members and, lastly, validate the effect of some other variables on individual ethics. A newly-created questionnaire was filled by employees from several Portuguese companies (N=116), who had to assess their organizations’ CSR values and practices and rate a list of ethically-dubious corporate conduct examples. We assessed on the complexity of the constructs of CSR and ethicallydubious corporate conduct and we were able to better comprehend the association of the main variables with each other and some participant attributes, such as their organizational commitment and sociodemographical variables. The results of this exploratory study give some support the main hypothesis that the higher the perceived social responsibility, the less prone employees are to accept ethically-reprehensible practices and that this evidence is especially strong among the most committed workers. The influence of the other variables studied (e.g., gender, age, company seniority and religious orientation) also converge with the existing but sparse literature on the subject. These results suggest that the way in which organizational values and practices revolving around CSR are perceived may be considered a contextual determinant of the ethics of the employees, having a positive impact at the individual level of the organization.