Corporate Social Responsibility as a Tool for Satisfying the Narcissistic Needs of a Hubristic CEO

For the last decade, academia and business together have paid considerable attention to corporate social responsibility(CSR). In the past, most have focused on the relationship between CSR and firm performance, but the former’s influence on the latter has remained inconclusive at best. This inconsistency may arise because firms engage in CSR activities for different motivations. That is, not all firms pursue CSR activities for economic or financial purposes. A firm may participate CSR for non-economic or social motivations. In this paper, we thus investigate the antecedents of CSR, particularly non-economic or social motivations for CSR. Thus, we focus on CEO hubris as an antecedent of CSR and attempt to answer the following two related questions: First, how CEO with a hubris affects CSR? Second, which types of CSR does hubristic CEOs focus on? We examined 178 firms in South Korea and our results showed that CEO with a hubris is positively related to CSR. Of particular interest was our finding that hubristic CEOs focused on CSR activities that targeted secondary rather than primary stakeholders. While these activities for CSR targeting secondary stakeholders have less direct relationship to corporate survival and financial performance, hubristic CEOs use these activities to project themselves confidently. This action indicates that a hubristic CEO uses CSR activities as a means to attract public attention and thereby satisfy his or her narcissistic needs.