A Meta-analytical investigation of the relationship between corporate social and financial performance

José Allouche (1) , Patrice Laroche (2)

1 GREGOR - Groupe de Recherche en Gestion des Organisations
2 CEREFIGE - Centre Européen de Recherche en Economie Financière et Gestion des Entreprises

The growing number of academic studies on the impact of Corporate Social Performance (CSP) on Corporate Financial Performance (CFP) and the mixed findings they report complicate efforts among managers and academics to identify the outcomes of corporate social responsibility. These mixed findings and the growing interest of managers on having satisfied corporate social policy point to the value of empirically synthesizing the evidence on the relationship between CSP and CFP. Although many reviews of these studies have been published (Ullman, 1985 ; Griffin & Mahon, 1997 ; Roman, Haybor & Agle, 1999 ; Margolis & Walsh, 2003), there have been little attempts to use formal statistical tools to synthesize the results (Orlitky & Benjamin, 2001 ; Orlitky, Schmidt & Rynes, 2003). Orlitsky et al. (2003) obviously made valuable contributions, presenting the first meta-analysis of the empirical evidence on the impact of CSP on firm financial performance. However, since this last meta-analytic review, dozens of studies examining the link between CSP and CFP have been published in academic journals and recent studies have also focused on the effect of CSP on CFP in a broader international context. To this end, we conduct a new meta-analysis of the reported findings on the CSP/CFP relationship. We document that CSP is strongly related to CFP on average. We also find that measurement and method that characterize the research often moderate relationship strength between CSP and CFP. Finally, we discuss the implications surrounding these effects and offer several directions for future research

Le lien entre la responsabilité sociale et la performance financière des entreprises a fait l'objet de nombreuses études empiriques au cours de ces dernières années, notamment aux Etats-Unis. La vision retirée des résultats des études existantes traduit pour une part l'influence probable de la Responsabilité Sociale de l'entreprise sur sa performance économique et financière, et pour une autre part, le sentiment d'un lien fragile et quelque peu contrasté. Le décryptage des méthodologies employées dans ces travaux et de leurs résultats révèle de nombreuses confusions, voire des incohérences, à la fois sur les échantillons, les mesures des variables et les relations testées de causalité. L'objectif de cette contribution est de faire un état d'avancement de la recherche académique sur les interactions entre la responsabilité sociale et la performance financière des entreprises et proposer quelques pistes de reflexion et de recherche sur le sujet.

Mots clés: RSE; performance

Mots clés: Corporate social performance; financial performance

Domaines: Gestion et management

José Allouche, Patrice Laroche. A Meta-analytical investigation of the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Revue de Gestion des Ressources Humaines, 2005, 57, pp.18. ⟨hal-00923906⟩