CSR Activities in the Czech Sme Segment

Abstract

The aim of the study is to find out the perception of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by the segment of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Czech Republic. In connection with the objectives of the study, a questionnaire survey was carried out on a sample of 419 respondents – business owners and managers. The data were collected from September 2019 to January 2020. χ2 and Z-score were used to assess the hypotheses. It was found that there were statistical differences in the perception of some aspects of the positive impact of the introduction of the CSR concept in case of monitoring responses based on the geographic scope of the business. The results showed that although the manager should take into account the ethical and moral implications of his decisions, less than half of the respondents are familiar with the concept of CSR and enforce it in their management practice and ultimately managers cannot identify positive benefits from CSR implementation – it declares positive answers whose values oscillate around 30%. The findings show that there are no statistically significant differences in the answers of managers depending on the size of the company - this proves that micro, small and medium enterprises, respectively their managers do not differ in their attitudes to the topic of CSR. The final effect of the paper is to show the perception of the concept of CSR of entrepreneurs - respondents in the Czech Republic.

The Perception of the Market and Operational Area of Business by Service Sector and Tourism Companies in terms of CSR implementation

“…Many companies that behave socially responsibly consider the manifestation of CSR with the production of quality products and services (Metzker & Streimikis, 2020). Closely related to this is T2's claim, which focuses on the declining trend of customer or service complaints from customers.…”

Projection of SDGs in Codes of Ethics—Case Study about Lost in Translation

“…They emphasize the need for a pragmatic and often strong materialistic profit-increasing orientation of businesses (MacGregor et al 2020a) along with the potential of the SDGs to lead to waste (MacGregor et al 2020b) and be, ultimately, even branding-wise contra-productive (MacGregor Pelikánová and MacGregor 2020). Additionally, as it was proven by Metzker and Streimikis (2020), quite often even when the decision-makers are aware of the need or postulated long-term benefits of an ethical approach and moral implications of their decisions, in reality they are not fully familiar with the real meaning of the concepts of CSR, which undermines the possibility of its enforcement in management practice. As a result, before engaging in further elaboration, one needs to fully appreciate the complete literature review for this topic (Section 2) and, via appropriate methodology (Section 3) process the, at least theoretical, potential of codes of ethics to overlap with SDGs (Section 4) and the empirical findings about the reality of this potential and its materialization (Section 5).…”

“…(Sroka and Szántó 2018;Belas et al 2020). Nevertheless, there are already indices that businesses fail in making adequate provisions oriented towards SDGs (Adshead et al 2019;Thacker et al 2019) and ultimately the commitment to go for SDGs is falling behind, especially at the local and individual levels (Mansell et al 2020;Metzker and Streimikis 2020).…”

New trends in codes of ethics: Czech business ethics preferences by the dawn of COVID-19

“…Consequently, each and every business needs to make a decision about its attitude to ethics and its eventual declaration via a Code. The conventional profit maximization approach perceives basically all ethical commitments as an expense (Strouhal et al, 2015), perhaps even waste (Mac-Gregor et al, 2020), and points out that there is a rather low awareness and/or interest regarding ethical and moral implications of business operations by managers and even other stakeholders (Metzker & Streimikis, 2020). In contrast, the stakeholder approach litigates for the multistakeholder model, for "profit, people, planet" orientation and the famous Carroll´s pyramid, which calls businesses to do what is morally and/or legally right or at least expected, see economic (Sroka & Szántó, 2018) and law requirements along with ethical expectations and philanthropic desires (Carroll, 2016).…”