The Research On The Effect Of The Top Management Team On The Corporate Social Responsibility

The "12th Five-Year" Plan has made social responsibility as a new direction offuture development. Policy makers, business managers, scientists and the public areconcern for the research on the corporate social responsibility and its social impact. Inthe past two decades, domestic corporate-social-responsibility theorists andpractitioners focused on the results effect of the corporate social responsibilitybehavior and emphasized the research on the relationship between corporate socialresponsibility and corporate competitive edge or performance and they pay littleattention to the antecedents of corporate social responsibility, which is the motivationmechanism of corporate social responsibility behavior. As all we know that anyimplementation of corporate strategic behavior is derived from the decision of seniormanagement team who stands at the top of enterprise "pyramid". So this paperattempted to study corporate social responsibility issues from the top managementteam perspective to explore the cause of corporate social responsibility behavior andto explain the corporate social responsibility "paradox" problem in the practicalbusiness management.Based on the high order theory, corporation social responsibility strategy andstakeholder theory, this paper studied the top management team and corporate socialresponsibility form following two aspects. Firstly, this paper reviewed relevantliteratures on the basis of existing theories, analyzed the relationship between the topmanagement team characteristics and corporate social responsibility and put forwardthat there is relevance between the corporate social responsibility as a corporatestrategy and top management features. Secondly, based on the relevant literatures andtheories, this paper made listed companies which issued corporate socialresponsibility reports as research samples and did empirical study on how the topmanagement team characteristics of223listed companies effects the corporate socialresponsibility.The empirical study found that the heterogeneity of the executive team (age,tenure, education level, salaries and team size) has significantly positive effect on thecorporate social responsibility. More specifically, the age heterogeneity of the topmanagement team has a reverse effect on corporate social responsibility, term andoccupation experience heterogeneity has a positive effect on the corporate social responsibility and education heterogeneity has no significant effect on corporatesocial responsibility. Finally, this paper discussed how to better fulfill corporatesocial responsibilities from the two levels of government and business.