기업의 사회적 책임활동이 제품 및 기업평가에 미치는 영향: 신뢰의 매개역할을 중심으로

According to the great economist Milton Friedman, corporate has only one responsibility that is economic responsibility making a profit while observing the law. Market economy would result in improved efficiency and increased economic results. However, corporate efficiency-oriented activities may exert detrimental impact on well-beings of society through environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources and exploitation of labor in under developed countries. Business entities exist within a market society. Their activities influence the society and at the same time are influenced by the society. Corporate is not separated from society. Since the globalization process starting 1990s, society witnessed the movement of environmental and social sustainability. Consumers and investors have been asking corporate to conduct socially responsible actions such as producing environmentallyfriendly products, embodying product with socially responsible attributes, fair labor conditions in developing countries etc. Business integrates social demands into its management. It is not new that today’s business organizations are expected to exhibit ethical and moral management and to carry out social responsibility as a good corporate citizen. Since South Korea emerged as a newly industrialized country during the 1980s, Korean corporations have become active in carrying out their social responsibility as a good corporate citizen to society. In spite of the short history of corporate social responsibility, Korean companies have actively participated in corporate philanthropy. Corporations’ significant donations to various social causes, no-lay-off policies, corporate volunteerism and green marketing are evidences of their commitment to corporate citizenship. Corporate social responsibility is now an essential management practice whereby corporation can strengthen its sustainable value creation processes by enhancing the trust assets underlying the relationships between the business and the stakeholders. A critical but elusive issue in corporate social responsibility research has been the impacts of a company's social initiatives on the consumers' evaluation of product and corporation. Researchers in the area of management have studied the relationship between corporate social performance and business performances. These researchers explored a direct relationship either between CSR and its financial successes. However, the results of these studies were inconclusive and inconsistent. In the area of Marketing, studies have been conducted to estimate the effects of CSR on consumers' product evaluation and corporate evaluation. The results of these studies were not conclusive either. Different from the past studies, in this study we postulates that the consumers’ trust play an essential mediating role in the relationship between the four dimensions (economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic) of corporate social responsibility activities (Carroll,1979) and the product/corporate evaluation. Trust is conceptualized into two different forms: expertise-based trust and benevolencebased trust. A model integrating four dimensions of CSR, two forms of trust, and the product/ corporate evaluation is tested using data of 384 young consumers. The results of data analysis show that the corporate economic responsibility positively influences on the expert-based trust and benevolence-based trust. However, the corporate legal, the corporate ethical, and the corporate philanthropic responsibility have a significant impact not on the expertbased trust but only on the benevolence-based trust. Finally, our results indicate that the expertbased trust and the benevolence-based trust both have a significant influence on the product evaluation and on the corporate evaluation. Thus, this study demonstrates that trust indeed plays a mediating role between CSR and the product/corporate evaluation. The results of this study will help corporations to understand the relative importance of the four different responsibilities in influencing two different forms of trust. In addition, this study will allow corporations to understand how important the corporate legal, the ethical responsibility and the philanthropic responsibility are for them to build consumers' trust. Furthermore, this study will also permits the corporations to properly evaluate their resources allocation decisions. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings, and limitations as well as future research directions.