Abstract:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly important for companies, which induced many researchers to investigate the corporate sustainability performance-financial performance relationship. This study provides a contribution to current literature by incorporating the concept of CSR decoupling since little research has investigated this concept. This study expects that CSR decoupling has a negative effect on financial performance. Furthermore, this study expects this negative effect to be stronger for companies located in stakeholder-oriented countries than for companies located in shareholder-oriented countries. The data is gathered from 2040 companies located across the world for the period 2002-2017. The hypotheses are tested using a panel data regression analysis. The results find partial support for the negative effect of CSR decoupling, however, inconclusive results are found regarding a stronger negative effect of CSR decoupling for companies located in stakeholder-oriented countries than for companies located in shareholder-oriented countries. Future research could build on this paper and elaborate on the effect of CSR decoupling within these countries by providing more robust results.
