Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities may facilitate firms to meet stakeholders' demands and gain legitimacy, there is little understanding of whether and how they may bring in harmful consequences such as chief executive officer (CEO) wrongdoing. We developed a framework to explore how CSR activities lead to CEO wrongdoing based on the fraud triangle of pressure, opportunity, and rationalization. Using a sample of 530 listed firms in China that issued CSR reports between 2011 and 2018, we found a positive relationship between CSR participation and CEO wrongdoing. We also found that this positive relationship is strengthened by firms' internal capability to gain profit and their risk orientation. Our study contributes to the CSR literature by examining the potential dark side of CSR activities, and by bridging stakeholder theory and CEO wrongdoing literature.
While extant research shows a curvilinear relationship between aspiration performance gaps and innovation input, we know far less about how vocational experiences of key firm decisions makers may shift this relationship. We propose the concept of executives' vocational socialization and explore how it influences the relationship between firms' aspiration performance gaps and innovation input from the perspectives of the behavioral theory of the firm and upper echelons theory. We theorize that two aspects of executives' vocational socialization, namely, executives' technical career experience and firm tenure, strengthen the inverted U-shaped relationship between the negative aspiration performance gap and innovation input and weaken the U-shaped relationship between the positive aspiration performance gap and innovation input respectively. We test these hypotheses using a panel dataset of 1158 listed firms in China from 2008 to 2017, and the empirical results from switching regression and fixed-effect models support our hypotheses. Our study contributes to research on the aspiration performance gap, innovation input, and behavioral theory of the firm.
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