مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکتی: یک مزیت یا ضرر و زیان برای شرکت های نوآور؟ Corporate social responsibility: a boon or bane for innovative firms?

Introduction Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is primarily considered as a corporate issue proactively taken to maintain a firm’s and society’s long-term prosperity (Hawn & Ioannou, 2016; Öberseder, Schlegelmilch, & Murphy, 2013). CSR has been widely studied across all broad management domains i.e. marketing, strategy, finance and operations. Majority of past research on CSR focused largely on managerial perspective and discussed about which CSR initiatives tend to enhance corporate performance (Basu & Palazzo, 2008). To mention a few, the extant literature covers the impact of CSR in terms of brand equity, corporate performance, market value, corporate reputation and firm’s sustainability (Hur, Kim, & Woo, 2014; Korschun, Bhattacharya, & Swain, 2014; Malik, 2015; Wang, Chen, Yu, & Hsiao, 2015). A few studies highlighted that it is important that consumers should discern the CSR activities of the firm in a right manner (Lee, Park, & Lee, 2013; Öberseder et al., 2013). The importance of innovative firms is increasing day by day as innovation is positively related to increased profitability (Hausman & Johnston, 2014). However, when the firm is innovative, consumers are sceptical about the firm. This is because an innovative firm does not convey detailed information about its innovation to consumers. Therefore, there is always information asymmetry in the market. Further, the innovative firms differ from other firms in terms of financial, technological, strategic and consumer orientations (Aghion, Bond, Klemm, & Marinescu, 2004). Therefore, it would be interesting to explore how consumers perceive CSR activities of innovative firms i.e. whether it is important for innovative firms to engage in CSR activities? There have been a few attempts to understand how consumers perceive the CSR activities of a firm (Mejri & Bhatli, 2014; Skarmeas & Leonidou, 2013). But no study has explored consumers’ perception of CSR initiatives in the case of innovative firms. The present study is an attempt to fill up this gap. Innovative firms introduce information asymmetry in the market (Jeon & Menicucci, 2008), therefore, consumers feel risky while purchasing a product or service from such innovative firms (Bouncken & Kraus, 2013). The signals given by the firm in the form of CSR activities will act as messages for consumers. If the consumers have trust on firm, then these messages will be taken more positively by the consumers.