Exploring Different Motivations behind Socially Responsible Firm Behavior: Strategic and Conspicuous CSR

This study specifies two behavioral patterns of morality embodiment in organizations and examines how these behavioral patterns affect financial performance. When firms pursue morality, they tend to consider how to incorporate socially responsible activities into their business. The motivation behind the engagement in socially responsible initiatives can be either a genuine embodiment of morality, which leads to societal benefit, or a conspicuous embodiment, which does not. Given this, we juxta- pose the two types of morality embodiment with corporate social responsibility (CSR) as strategic CSR and conspicuous CSR. We argue that these two types of CSR activity have different impacts on firm performance. We thus examine the impacts of strategic and conspicuous CSR on financial performance. The study finds that strategic CSR correlates positively with financial performance while conspicuous CSR has a negative relationship. These findings provide further insight into the relationship between CSR and financial performance.