Research On The Impact Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Organizational Resilience

The increase of environmental uncertainty and frequent disasters threaten firms and society all the time,which not only leads to serious economic recession but also threatens the survival of firms.Especially in the interconnected world of all things,any crisis may trigger the butterfly effect and bring disaster to firms.These threats highlight the importance of organizational resilience in helping firms survive,adapt,and grow in difficulties and maintaining organizational stability and security in an uncertain environment.The accelerated change in the new century also increases the urgency for firms to deal with the growing uncertainty.In academic circles,the research on organizational resilience has also attracted extensive attention from scholars.However,most of the studies discuss the concept and antecedences of organizational resilience at the theoretical level,only a few studies empirically verify the formation mechanism of organizational resilience in specific situations(such as financial crisis,social movement,or supply chain interruption),while,few scholars study the formation mechanism of formation in a broader context.In the antecedences study of organizational resilience,the relationship between corporate social responsibility and organizational resilience has attracted more and more scholars’ attention.Existing studies have shown that corporate social responsibility has a positive impact on organizational resilience.By creating a good relationship with stakeholders,corporate social responsibility makes stakeholders more willing to share information with firms,improve their trust in firms,improve employees’ organizational identity and organizational commitment,to improve organizational resilience.However,the existing research should be expanded for the following four reasons.Firstly,such an intermediary mechanism is only theoretically put forward and is not empirically verified.Secondly,the most relevant research on crisis management is based on attribution theory and situational crisis communication theory to study stakeholders’ perception and response to the crisis and how the organization affects these perceptions,ignoring the formation of stakeholders’ evaluation.In addition,relevant studies on media coverage show that media coverage could be regarded as the main legal source to reduce the information asymmetry of corporate behavior.Besides,media also is an important external evaluator which affects the attitude,perception,and decision-making of other stakeholders.However,most studies only connect media coverage with the public’s attention to firms,and the sentiment evaluation of media coverage has not received enough attention.Finally,the boundary conditions of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience in non-specific crises are not clear.Based on the existing research and combined with the literature on management and communication,this study will explore the formation mechanism and boundary conditions of organizational resilience in different situations and try to solve the following research questions.Whether corporate social responsibility can improve organizational resilience? How can corporate social responsibility improve organizational resilience? Is the impact of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience consistent in different situations? To further explore the above research problems,this study designed the following two sub-studies.Study 1.The impact of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience to the crisis situationCombining the stakeholder theory and agenda-setting theory,this study explores how corporate social responsibility affects media sentiment evaluation and how this,in turn,shapes organizational resilience during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.First,the media are more likely to show a positive sentiment evaluation of corporate social responsibility since that corporate social responsibility is behavior and practice beneficial to stakeholders and society.Therefore,this study argues that corporate social responsibility will be positively associated with positive media sentiment evaluation and negatively related to negative media sentiment evaluation.Secondly,the relevant studies of agenda-setting theory suggest that media sentiment evaluation has a significant impact on the attitudes and behaviors of other stakeholders.Based on the above research,this study argues that corporate social responsibility will bring more positive media sentiment evaluation and less negative media sentiment evaluation so that firms can get more support from other stakeholders.Therefore,firms with more corporate social responsibility will experience lower losses in the short run and take a shorter time to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.For a sample of firms listed in China and the methods of OLS regression,survival analysis,instrumental variable method,and other robustness tests,this study analyzed the sales and stock prices and found that most of the assumptions are supported.Study 2.The impact of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience to the non-crisis situationsCombining the stakeholder theory and resource-based view,this study explores how corporate social responsibility affects organizational resilience in the context of non-crisis situations.This study argues that corporate social responsibility will be positively associated with organizational resilience because corporate social responsibility helps firms obtain key resources,perceive and seize new opportunities and mitigate the impact of threats.This study expects that,firms with more corporate social responsibility will experience lower stock price volatility,higher long-term sales growth,and higher survival rates in the context of non-crisis situations.This study also theorizes that the impact of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience will be especially sensitive to the different degrees of environmental uncertainty.In addition,this study further verifies that the mediating role of media sentiment evaluation still exists in non-crisis situations.For a sample of firms from 2010 to 2019 listed in China and the methods of fixed effect model,Cox proportional risk model,instrumental variable method,and other robustness tests,this study analyzed the sales,stock prices,and survival time and found that most of the assumptions are supported.In conclusion,this study contributes to the extant research in several ways.First,by combing the existing definitions of organizational resilience,this study enriches the theoretical and empirical studies of organizational resilience by exploring the formation mechanism and boundary conditions of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience in different situations.Second,combined with the research results of management and communication,this study emphasizes the primary role of media sentiment evaluation in social evaluation and social support and provides a new research perspective and empirical support for the studies between corporate social responsibility and organizational resilience.Thirdly,starting from the perspective of evaluation of external stakeholders,this study enriches the research on stakeholder management and media coverage by emphasizing the influence of media on other stakeholders.Finally,this study explores the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and organizational resilience and promotes research on the impact of corporate social responsibility on organizational resilience.