شهرت کار و عملکرد مالی: آیا رابطه علتی وجود دارد؟ Labour reputation and financial performance: is there a causal relationship?

1. Introduction The use of economic resources from companies to achieve social objectives is a growing trend in society in response to social demands made by their stakeholders. Investment in corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the preamble to what is known as corporate social performance (hereafter CSP), which is the configuration of a business organisation with social responsibility principles and policies, programmes and observable results about social relations of the company (Wartick and Cochran, 1985). The results of CSP are assessed by the stakeholders. The reputation of the firm serves as a tool to know how well the organisation is satisfying the stakeholders’ demands and expectations on it (Figure 1). The inclusion of social demands in business strategy has generated great interest and controversy in the academic literature. Increasing the economic results of the company is a priority objective, and higher economic resources are useful to invest and growth. However, the conditions under the corporate financial performance (CFP) are obtained affect the sustainability of the company. Stakeholder’s theory argues that, in addition to get benefit, if companies respond to social demands they legitimise their activity and thus maintain a sustainable growth over time. For this reason, the line of research in the academic literature to study the relationship between CSP and CFP has been relevant from the 1970s until today. Furthermore, the concept of CSP is defined as a multidimensional construct, as it brings together different social areas (environmental, labour, products, customers, etc.). Thus, in the academic literature, there are studies on the relationship between the specific social dimensions of CSP and CFP, and not all dimensions have the same effect on financial performance. In addition, not all dimensions of CSP have received the same attention, and there is a big difference in the number of studies related to each dimension. Labour dimension of CSP has received less attention despite managers and employees are concerned about the quality of working life (QWL), and it has a critical role in many of the labour market theories (e.g. the need satisfaction approach to QWL, or spill-over approach to QWL) (Chauvin and Guthrie, 1994). As a result, there is little empirical evidence of its impact on financial performance (Lau and May, 1998; Ballou et al., 2003). The main reason for the lack of studies in this critical area is the difficulty that has existed in the past to measure the employee’s quality working life in a company (Lau and May, 1998; Chauvin and Guthrie, 1994; Sirgy et al., 2001).