Cause-Related Marketing and Ethnocentrism: The Moderating Effects of Geographic Scope and Perceived Economic Threat

Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Amongst the various factors that managers need to consider when designing a CRM campaign is the cause’s geographic scope, i.e., should the CRM campaign benefit local, national, or international communities? Although previous research has examined the importance of geographic scope in the effectiveness of the CRM campaigns, it has largely ignored consumer reactions to CRM campaigns from a local cultural identity perspective, such as ethnocentric identity. This study brings together these two important factors to examine (through the lens of Social Identity Theory) how consumer ethnocentrism affects CRM effectiveness in campaigns varying in geographic scope. We test our hypotheses through an experimental study of 322 British consumers and three different geographic scopes (UK, Greece, and Ethiopia). Our results show that ethnocentric consumers show a positive bias towards products advertised through national CRM campaigns; however, there is a diversity of reactions towards different international geographic scopes, based on the levels of ‘perceived economic threat’. Ethnocentric consumers prefer international CRM campaigns that benefit people located in a country posing a lower vs. a higher economic threat to the domestic economy and the self. Our study contributes to a broader understanding of factors affecting the effectiveness of CRM campaigns and help managers design better CRM campaigns by carefully selecting the geographic scope, after considering a rising consumer segment: the ethnocentric consumer.Business Economic and Informatics School Research Grant (SRG), Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

The Relationship between femininity and sustainability reporting

Most research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and stakeholder engagement with sustainable development has focused on the internal factors of corporations, leaving aside the characteristics of the institutional, cultural, and economic context of the country where corporations operate. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of femininity in the disclosure of sustainability information based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines at a developed country context. We use three measures of the CSR information disclosure by country: the GRI reports per million of inhabitants, the GRI reports application level, and the percentage of GRI reports with external assurance. The results of this study show that countries with higher femininity orientation provide a higher quantity of sustainability reports, but do not provide higher quality sustainability reports. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environmen

International Evidence on the Determinants of Organizational Ethical Vulnerability

© 2018 British Academy of Management This paper proposes a model to explain what makes organizations ethically vulnerable. Drawing upon legitimacy, institutional, agency and individual moral reasoning theories we consider three sets of explanatory factors and examine their association with organizational ethical vulnerability. The three sets comprise external institutional context, internal corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure. We combine these three sets of factors and develop an analytical framework for classifying ethical issues and propose a new model of organizational ethical vulnerability. We test our model on a sample of 253 firms that were involved in ethical misconduct and compare them with a matched sample of the same number of firms from 28 different countries. The results suggest that weak regulatory environment and internal corporate governance, combined with profitability warnings or losses in the preceding year, increase organizational ethical vulnerability. We find counterintuitive evidence suggesting that firms’ involvement in bribery and corruption prevention training programmes is positively associated with the likelihood of ethical vulnerability. By synthesizing insights about individual and corporate behaviour from multiple theories, this study extends existing analytical literature on business ethics. Our findings have implications for firms’ external regulatory settings, corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure

Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender : a micro-foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

While studies show that organizational diversity is beneficial to organizations’ practice of environmental sustainability, we know very little about the effect that the gender of an individual director can have on sustainability practice. In this empirical paper, we employ a micro-foundational approach to examine whether the number of women on an organization’s board of directors has a direct effect on its attitude towards environmental sustainability, regardless of the national culture in which the organization is located. Culture in this study is measured through grammatical gender marking, a unique approach to measuring female-oriented cultural effects. Previous studies show that certain cultures have more gender roles than others, which in turn affects general and organizational behavior in that society. Grammatical gender marking enables us to study the impact of gender of the individual director on the organization’s attitude towards environmental sustainability across cultures, by empirically examining data from 71 countries, sampling a total of 4,500 organizations for multiple years and industries. Our findings show that organizations become significantly more proactive in environmental sustainability with the appointment of even one woman to the board of directors, regardless of the local culture. We further show that the organization’s level of disclosure regarding its sustainability activities, increases with the number of women on the board of directors. Our data also show a significantly negative relationship between various gender-based language indices and the presence of women on the board of directors. In cultures defined by a language that has clear grammatical gender markings, there is a tendency to appoint fewer women to boards of directors, thereby influencing indirectly the organization’s attitude towards environmental sustainability

Gender Equality and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Middle East

This chapter focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in relation to gender equality in the Arab Middle East. It examines the relationship between CSR and gender in the workplace whilst exploring the link between CSR and human resource management (HRM) policies and practices. The chapter first presents some seminal work on gender equality and diversity management, looking at the business case for gender equality within the CSR and HRM contexts, before engaging with relevant work on gender equality in the Arab Middle East. It concludes by offering recommendations on advancing the equality agenda at the macro- and meso-levels, within a framework which recognises the centrality of agency of women, as well as the potential of positive changes through corporations being seen as ‘agents of change’. The chapter advocates for organisational and governmental policies to promote gender equality in the Arab Middle East

Prosociality in business: a human empowerment framework

This study introduces a human empowerment framework to better understand why some businesses are more socially oriented than others in their policies and activities. Building on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we argue that human empowerment—comprised of four components: action resources, emancipative values, social movement activity, and civic entitlements—enables, motivates, and entitles individuals to pursue social goals for their businesses. Using a sample of over 15,000 entrepreneurs from 43 countries, we report strong empirical evidence for two ecological effects of the framework components on prosociality. We find that human empowerment (1) lifts entrepreneurs’ willingness to choose a social orientation for their business, and (2) reinforces the gender effect on prosociality in business activity. We discuss the human empowerment framework’s added value in understanding how modernization processes fully leverage the potential of social business activities for societies

Frequent CEO Turnover and Firm Performance: The Resilience Effect of Workforce Diversity

© 2020, Springer Nature B.V. CEO turnover (or succession) is a critical event in an organization that influences organizational processes and performance. The objective of this study is to investigate whether workforce diversity (i.e., age, gender, and education-level diversity) might have a resilience effect on firm performance under the frequency of CEO turnover. Based on a sample of 409 Korean firms from 2010 to 2015, our results show that firms with more frequent CEO turnover have a lower firm performance. However, firms with more gender and education-level diversity could buffer the disruptive effect of frequent CEO turnover on firm performance to offer a benefit to the organization. Our theory and findings suggest that effectively managing diverse workforce can be a resilience factor in an uncertain organizational environment because diverse workforce has complementary skills and behaviors that can cope better with uncertainty and signals social inclusion of an organization, thus fostering a long-term exchange relationship. These findings contribute to the literature on CEO turnover (or succession) and diversity