Strategic Leaders and Corporate Social Responsibility: A Meta-Analytic Review

Abstract

A large body of literature has focused on strategic leaders’ (i.e., CEOs’, TMT members’, and board directors’) influence on corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, inconsistent findings have been reported, impeding the theoretical and practical implications of this line of inquiry. Drawing from the strategic leadership literature and the corporate governance literature, we conducted a meta-analysis based on 318 samples to consolidate disparate findings on the relationships between frequently measured executive and board attributes and CSR. We also examined country managerial discretion and investor protection strength as potential boundary conditions of these relationships. With some exceptions, our meta-analytic results show that these executive and board attributes explained meaningful variance in CSR, and that country managerial discretion and investor protection strength played limited moderating roles. Additional analyses suggest that the board characteristics had a stronger relationship with CSR than the executive characteristics.

The Management of Socio‐Political Issues and Environments: Toward a Research Agenda for Corporate Socio‐Political Engagement

“…Specifically, scholar have explored how MNEs prioritize and organize their philanthropy activities across different countries are profoundly shaped by the varied urgency to manage institutional voids (Doh et al, 2017) and engage with key host-country socio-political stakeholders. While others have taken great strides to understand the influences of numerous executive and board characteristics on CSR-related decision making from the upper echelon perspective (Wang et al, 2023). Studies explicating the social and psychological processes that operate behind CSR remain rare.…”

Environmental, social, and governance demands in the boardroom

“…Boards are charged with ensuring that the firm's top management team serves the best interests of that firm (Forbes and Milliken, 1999). As such, they monitor (Fama and Jensen, 1983), provide advice and counsel (Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978), and supply resources (Hillman and Dalziel, 2003) that have shown to affect firms' ESG behavior (Wang, Devine, Molina-Sieiro, and Holmes, 2023).…”

“…The above mentioned research streams clearly provided a richer understanding about the role of board attributes in terms of demographic director characteristics and different board structures and compositions (for reviews see Bolourian, Angus, and Alinaghian, 2021;Jain and Jamali, 2016;Walls and Berrone, 2017;Zaman, Jain, Samara, and Jamali, 2022). At the same time, decades of dialogue and data on different types of governance structures (varying mostly in the degree to which boards operate formally independently from TMTs, for a meta-analyses see Wang et al, 2023), and on different board compositions (e.g., degree of demographic diversity on boards, for a review see Jain and Jamali, 2016) failed to materialize in unequivocal advise on how boards can best be organized and positioned within a firm (Daily et al, 2003). For example, the board composition factor diversity has been linked both positively (Cook and Glass, 2015;Post, Rahman, and Rubow, 2011) as well as negatively to ESG-related practices (Hafsi and Turgut, 2013;Olthuis and van den Oever, 2020).…”

“…Apart from their formal roles, directors have their own perspectives and preferences about how firms should achieve corporate objectives. As such, this research stream has been interest in the characteristics and values that guide directors and boards as a whole (Wang et al, 2023).…”

“…In the realm of personality traits, agentic traits -those that pertain to the interest of the self, such as dominance, self-confidence, extraversion and narcissism -have been at the heart of research attention. For example, sustainability outcomes have been linked to narcissism (Wang et al, 2023) as narcissistic CEOs are argued to favor sustainability on the ground of believing that it is good for their reputation and visibility (Petrenko, Aime, Ridge, and Hill, 2016). Additionally, monitoring outcomes have been linked to agentic traits as agentic CEOs are believed to decrease the governance abilities of directors due to exerting power, being assertive and forceful (Cragun et al, 2020;Herrmann and Nadkarni, 2014;Zhu and Chen, 2015).…”