Temporal Orientation and Corporate Social Responsibility: Global Evidence

Jongmoo Jay Choi, Jimi Kim, Oded Shenkar

Journal of Management Studies · 2023 · Volume 60 · Issue 1

Abstract

There has been a growing emphasis on the importance of a long-term perspective in academia and practice. Yet understanding of the interdependency of those factors – the temporal preferences embedded in organizations and in societal values as well as the influence of temporal orientation of investors – remains limited. We theorize whether and how a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) is affected by the societal temporal orientation, its time horizon, and its investors' time horizon. Using a global sample, we confirm that CSR activity is higher when a country has a long-term orientation culture, when the firm has a long-time horizon, and when the controlling institutional investor has a long-term investment horizon. We also find that the national culture's long-term orientation heightens the effect of a firm's long-time horizon on its CSR. Further, our results show that the effects of temporal orientation are more pronounced in environmental than in social CSR.

Keywords

corporate social responsibility, temporal orientation, short-termism, patient capital, stakeholder theory, global corporate governance

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