Multinational Corporations and Citizenship Behavior: The Effects of Strategic Choices and National Institutions

This paper examines the effects of strategic choices and institutional environments of multinational corporations (MNCs) on their citizenship behavior in the host country. Our analysis of 199 MNCs in South Korea shows that strategic choices, such as ownership concentration and the motivation of internationalization, are closely related to the MNCs’ general corporate citizenship behavior (CCB), while their institutional environments are not. Interestingly, however, MNCs’ specific CCB such as corporate environmental activities is facilitated by their home countries’ institutional conditions, even though they operate in the relatively lower level of institutional environments of the host country. Our finding suggests that MNCs’ CCB in the host country is influenced by the extent to which they rely on the resources in the host country and the effectiveness of institutions they face regardless of host and home countries.