The Research On The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility And Business Performance

Since the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) has been raised in the early 20^th century, it attracted great attention both of the theory and practice. Foreign researches about CSR has become increasingly mature, but different views on the relationship between CSR and business performance still existed. Some scholars believed that CSR can improve business performance, while others took the opposite view. Foreign enterprises also paid high attention on CSR, which has been taken as a strategic investment by most of them. In China, the research on CSR was still in the stage of development, and scholars also didn't have a unanimous conclusion about the correlation between CSR and business performance. Existing in such environment that CSR was not researched intensive and the market economic system was not perfect, many enterprises haven't established the concept of CSR, they believed CSR will increase their costs, and finally affect business performance. But we didn't agree with this statement, in our opinion, CSR can enhance business performance, therefore, we mainly study this issue from the perspective of stakeholder and verify our perspective.This paper first described the related concepts of CSR and business performance, then according to the stakeholder theory, CSR was divided into shareholders responsibility, creditors responsibility, staff responsibility, government responsibility and community responsibility. Subsequently we designed relevant indicators that can reflect CSR and business performance based on theoretical analysis, and selected listed companies of four industries from Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2009 and 2008 as samples for empirical research. We reduced the dimensions of the nine indicators by factor analysis and obtained four factor variables which representing the government responsibility, shareholders and creditors responsibility, community responsibility and staff responsibility. And then we designed multiple linear regression model to test our view.According to the theoretical analysis and empirical research, this paper reached the following conclusions: government responsibility, shareholders and creditors responsibility were significantly positively related to business performance, and staff responsibility, community responsibility were negatively related to performance. But based on the result of overall regression, CSR and business performance were significantly positively correlated, which suggested that fulfill CSR can significantly improve business performance. Thus we advice that enterprises should take CSR as their long-term investment, because the CSR activity can enhance corporate image, and obtain the support of social capita to improve the business performance and enhance competitiveness and growth capacity.