The relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and leadership has received considerable research attention in recent decades. While there have been several qualitative reviews, quantitative and systematic reviews of CSR–leadership links remain absent. The current paper seeks to address this gap by using a bibliometric method to analyze and visualize the evolution and research trends within the CSR–leadership domain. Drawing from a sample of 1432 peer-reviewed articles, we map the landscape of the CSR–leadership research domain and identify key developments and (...) patterns over the period 1994–2020. In addition to highlighting a range of publication trends including key theoretical influences, the findings also reveal an acceleration in the volume and breadth of CSR–leadership research. Seven subdomains (or clusters) are further identified (i.e., board characteristics, responsible leadership, emerging country context, team efficacy, CEO pay fairness, shareholder wealth, and cross-sector social partnership) and discussed based on the keywords using the log-likelihood ratio clustering algorithm. The analysis is further divided into three stages: namely, the initial stage (1991–2003), the rapid development stage (2004–2011), and the maturation stage (2012–present). These stages are used to present more fine-grained insights into the research patterns over time. We conclude by discussing implications of the bibliometric analysis and presenting several opportunities for future research. (shrink)

Ecological psychology regards culture as a response to the demands of the environment. As rice farming in history has significantly influenced the formation of human cultural consciousness, we investigate how the rice culture of a chairperson’s birthplace affects a firm’s CSR activities. Our main finding reveals a positive and significant correlation between a chairperson’s rice culture and CSR activities. Further analysis demonstrates that this positive relationship is particularly pronounced in private firms and family firms. We also examine the incremental effect (...) of individual management heterogeneity and find that the positive relationship is strengthened when the chairperson has a shorter tenure or higher level of education. Additionally, more developed regions help enhance this positive relationship. To address the endogeneity concerns, we adopt an instrumental variable approach and exogenous event analysis based on chairperson turnover. The results are robust to a set of additional tests. Overall, our findings document the benefits of a chairperson’s rice culture in developing countries like China and reveal how this benefit is priced into CSR performance. (shrink)

This study empirically analyzes how corporate social responsibility performance feedback impacts CSR performance, focusing on the performance feedback perspective of behavioral theory of the firm. By performing generalized least squares regression analysis based on Korean company data from 2012 to 2019, we presented evidence that positive social and historical performance feedback had a positive effect on CSR performance. Our results provide evidence that firms with higher social and historical CSR performance than CSR aspiration may have higher CSR performance than those (...) that do not. (shrink)

This study investigates whether and how the corporate social responsibility (CSR) profile of a company transfers to another company when an executive leaves a firm. We integrate upper echelon and institutional theories, and develop a novel measure of CSR profiles to explore this issue with a longitudinal data set of executive migrations over a 14-year period. We find that migrated executives assimilate elements of their old firms’ CSR profiles into their new firms (i.e., narrowing the distance between the two firms’ (...) CSR profiles), and this is true for both CSR and corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). This relationship is stronger when the migrating executive comes from a bigger firm with better social and financial performance than that of the new firm. We also find that the potential for improvement in CSR profiles in migration holds true for CSiR, but not CSR. Our findings have import for upper echelon theory and the managerial discretion afforded to executives regarding CSR decisions. (shrink)