Board Diversity and Corporate Social Responsibility

Maretno Harjoto (), Indrarini Laksmana () and Robert Lee ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2015, vol. 132, issue 4, 660 pages

Abstract: This study examines the impact of board diversity on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Using seven different measures of board diversity across 1,489 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2011, the study finds that board diversity is positively associated with CSR performance. Board diversity is associated with a greater number of areas in which CSR is strong and a fewer number of areas in which CSR is a concern. These findings support the stakeholder theory and are consistent with the view that board diversity enhances firms’ ability to satisfy the needs of their broader groups of stakeholders. We find that gender, tenure, and expertise diversities seem to be the driving factors of firms’ CSR activities. Furthermore, we find that board diversity significantly increases CSR performance by increasing CSR strengths and reducing CSR concerns for firms producing consumer-oriented products and firms operating in more competitive industries. Our results remain robust using different measures of CSR performance, different estimation methods, and different samples. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Diversity; Corporate social responsibility; Board of Directors; Stakeholders; M14; G34; G39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (232)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-014-2343-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:132:y:2015:i:4:p:641-660

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-014-2343-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().