We examine how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities yield high performance in Korean companies by addressing two related questions to expand our limited knowledge. First, what combinations of CSR activities yield high performance? Second, how do CSR activities form an interdependent system based on different corporate contexts? We draw the 2012-2018 data from the Korean Economic Justice Institute index for a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results reveal several effective CSR activity factor combinations under the given strategies and management environments. Companies with a high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with a low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies with a low financial performance from CSR activities, most of the causal pathways focus only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities' combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies' strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.Sustainability 2019, 11, 7078 2 of 20 effect on corporate value [12,13]. However, these propositions have been converging toward a singular argument: Recent CSR activities have had positive effects on corporate performance.In the extensive literature on Korean CSR activities, most scholars use an approach that distinguishes the actual effect of the relationship between CSR activities and business performance [14][15][16][17][18]. Though these studies have been relatively successful in identifying the relationship between CSR activities and business performance, a rigorous understanding of the choices and consequences of combinations of CSR activity factors in different entrepreneurial contexts is lacking. Furthermore, prior studies on CSR and performance are limited by the difficulty of identifying which CSR activity factors affect corporate performance when measuring a single index that sums CSR activity factors at the corporate level [19,20].Through this study, we expand the limited knowledge in this area by answering two related questions. First, what CSR activity combinations yield high corporate performance? The implicit assumption here is that-by combining the results of independent analyses of CSR activity factors, one can understand the combination of CSR activity factors that are effective [21]. However, observing the co-existence of a combination of CSR activities does not imply interdependence among the activity factors [22]. Therefore, the second question deals with identifying how CSR activity factors form an interdependent system depending on diverse corporate situations. Since the effects of individual factors are co...