A Research On The Relationship Of Corporate Social Responsibility And Enterprise Performance Based On Enterprise Life Cycle Theory

After the Reform and Opening up in China, the development of economy of our country has attained remarkable achievement. But accordingly, we also paid a heavy price on it, for example, the worst deterioration of the natural environment, the energy consumption in greater quantities and some other social problems which have become more and more obvious. Corporate social responsibility problem has drawn great attention of all sectors of society. Domestic and foreign scholars have carried out a series of researches on the relationship between the corporate social responsibility and the corporate performance. By reviewing their results, we can discover that the relationship between corporate social responsibility and their performance are in good consistency, although their results are not always consistent with each other. In the fierce market competition environment, the enterprises concerned more and more about their own life in order to keep their own sustainable development of long-term stability. However, there’re many differences on how to define the enterprise’s life cycle stage, the ability to fulfill social responsibility of enterprise in the different stages of life cycle, and the degree of fulfilling different stakeholders’ responsibilities. Also, enterprises in different life cycle stage should focus on which kinds of stakeholders and the degree of fulfilling different stakeholders’ responsibilities’ impacts become a problem that enterprise management and theory research should be paid more attention.In this paper, according to the research sample of manufacturing industries that have b een listed 3 years and above at the end of 2011, based on the life cycle theory and the growt h trend indicator, we divided the sample enterprise into four groups of initial stage, growing stage, mature stage and recessionary stage and use empirical analysis to analyze the four gr oups of corporate social responsibility and corporate performance. After determining the tar get of research and collecting data, firstly, we analyze the degree of fulfilling social respons ibilities of those enterprises that in the different stages of life cycle to the various stakehold ers and the differences of degree that enterprise fulfilling the responsibilities in different sta ges of life cycle by descriptive statistical analysis and variance. Then, we study the correlati on between the corporate performance and the degree that enterprises fulfill the social resp onsibility in different stages of life cycle through correlation analysis. Finally, according to the regression analysis, we further discussion the influences that the degree of fulfilling res ponsibilities to the various stakeholders of corporate performance when the enterprise in th e different stages of life cycle.The empirical results show that the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to employees in the start stage firms has negative effects to the enterprise operating conditions; the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to shareholders, long-term creditors, government and community has significant positive influences on the corporate earnings; the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to community has positive effects to the enterprise operating conditions. On the other hand, to those enterprises on the growth stage, the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to shareholders, long-term creditors, customers and the government has greatly positive influences on the corporate earnings and the degree of fulfilling responsibilities by long-term creditors, customers and the government. When it comes to those enterprises on the mature stage, the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to shareholders, long-term creditors, suppliers and the government has positive effects to the corporate earnings; the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to suppliers also has positive influences on the enterprise operating conditions; the degree of fulfilling social responsibilities to employees has obviously negative effects to the corporate earnings and the operating conditions; the degree of fulfilling social responsibilities to short-term creditors has negative effects to the corporate operating conditions. In the decline phase, the degree of enterprises’ fulfilling social responsibilities to employees has negative effects to the corporate operating conditions; the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to shareholders, long-term creditors and customers has obviously positive effects to the corporate earnings; the degree of fulfilling responsibilities to short-term creditors and suppliers has positive influences on the operating conditions of enterprises. Above, according to their stages of development, enterprises can build their own social responsibility framework, in order to improve the corporate performance and search for sustainable development...