Corporate Social and Financial Performance: A Meta-analysis

This piece of research suggests that corporate social, and
to a lesser extent environmental, responsibility is likely to
pay off.

Abstract (taken word for word from
the paper)

Most theorizing on the relationship between
corporate social/environmental performance
(CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP)
assumes that the current evidence is too
fractured or too variable to draw any
generalizable conclusions. With this
integrative, quantitative study, we intend to
show that the mainstream claim that we have
little generalizable knowledge about CSP and
CFP is built on shaky grounds. Providing a
methodologically more rigorous review than
previous efforts, we conduct a meta-analysis of
52 studies (which represent the population of
prior quantitative inquiry) yielding a total
sample size of 33,878 observations. The
metaanalytic findings suggest that corporate
virtue in the form of social responsibility
and, to a lesser extent, environmental
responsibility is likely to pay off, although
the operationalizations of CSP and CFP also
moderate the positive association. For example,
CSP appears to be more highly correlated with
accounting-based measures of CFP than with
market-based indicators, and CSP reputation
indices are more highly correlated with CFP
than are other indicators of CSP. This
meta-analysis establishes a greater degree of
certainty with respect to the CSP–CFP
relationship than is currently assumed to exist
by many business scholars. 

Authors: Marc Orlitzky, Frank L.
Schmidt, Sara L. Rynes Publisher: SAGE
Publications (
www.sagepublications.com

)

To access the analysis 
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