Impacts of Social Responsibility on the Promotion of Business Performance

Abstract

This research aims to examine the relationship of corporate social responsibility with organizational performance by considering the mediating roles of competitive advantage, corporate fame and customer satisfaction in food companies located in the northern Iranian city of Amol in year 2015. It is a descriptive-survey research conducted on 196 executive managers of food companies in the city of Amol selected as the study sample through random cluster sampling. A questionnaire is used to collect the data, and the SEM technique based on covariance (Lisrel v.8.8) serves to analyze the data. The research findings show that the construct of competitive advantage has the strongest relationship with organizational performance as compared to the constructs of corporate fame and customer satisfaction. This is while corporate social responsibility has the greatest effect on customer satisfaction based on the structural model. Also, the constructs of corporate fame and competitive advantage are found to have insignificant effects on the promotion of organizational performance and, consequently, on customer satisfaction. These findings provide managers with deep insights into the factors that create and reinforce organizational performance in stagnant economy by improving the indexes of corporate social responsibility.

Keywords

• corporate social responsibility
• corporate fame
• customer satisfaction
• competitive advantage
• organizational performance