This thesis focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR) to explore three
important determinants of corporate socially responsible or irresponsible behaviour
from different theoretical perspectives. To understand what shapes firm social outcomes,
existing literature has demonstrated a wide range of antecedents or determinants of CSR
at the institutional, organizational, and individual levels. However, some potential
institutional and managerial determinants have been overlooked, and this PhD project
aims to fill these research gaps by conducting three empirical studies.
At the institutional level, the first study examines the role of social media in
improving CSR performance with an integrated institutional and resource dependence
perspective. This study theorizes and proposes that, as the online public can provide
legitimacy and resources for firms, social media can exert informal institutional
pressures on CSR. The theoretical framework and hypotheses are tested by data from
Chinese publicly listed firms and a representative social media platform-Sina Weibo
(Chinese Twitter) between 2014 and 2018. The results show that firms with more
attention or more positive sentiment from the public on social media perform better at
CSR, and the positive relationships are weakened when firms are with higher state
ownership or efficiency. This study contributes to the literature on the institutional
determinants of CSR performance by highlighting the institutional role of social media
as an under-researched informal institutional force. At the organizational and individual levels, the second and third studies address the managerial determinants of corporate social performance and corporate misconduct respectively. These two studies are building on upper echelons theory that suggests organizational outcomes could be explained by the characteristics of top managers (e.g.,
top management team, CEOs). For corporate social performance involving social impact on stakeholders and external interaction with society, the second study suggests
CEO sociability as a potentially prominent determinant. Since the social media
presence of CEOs shows their social participation and engagement tendency (being
described as “social CEOs” in literature), this study examines whether social CEOs and
the implication of their social media engagement have an impact on corporate social
performance. A needs-affordances-consequences approach to social CEOs is developed
to understand their underlying motives and ability for social contribution, as well as the
moderating effect of CEOs’ social evaluation. Utilizing data of Chinese listed firms
from 2009 to 2020, the empirical results show that firms with social CEOs have a higher
level of corporate social performance than firms without social CEOs, and higher CEO
status or better CEO reputation can further amplify this positive relationship. The
second study enriches the upper echelons and CSR literature by demonstrating an
unstudied but important managerial characteristic especially in the social media era that
shapes firm social outcomes.
The third study shifts the focus to a common form of corporate irresponsible
behavior in emerging markets (i.e., accounting fraud) to discusses how the financial
misconduct is shaped by top managers’ regulatory focus in China. Regulatory focus
theory (RFT) proposes two kinds of regulatory focus motivating individuals, namely
promotion focus (a sensitivity to gains and a desire for advancement) and prevention
focus (a sensitivity to losses and a desire for security). Building on RFT and upper
echelons theory, an analytical framework is built to examine whether the propensity for
committing fraud varies with the types of top managers’ regulatory focus. Using a
sample of 14,549 firm-year observations, the empirical findings indicate that, to ensure
safety, the predominantly prevention-focused managers are more likely to commit fraud
than the principally promotion-focused managers, and this positive relationship is
strengthened with more negative feedback from the capital market or the media. This
study extends the corporate fraud literature by introducing a novel and influential
motivational attribute of top managers to explain why they engage in fraudulent
behavior in the context of weak investor protection and severe principle-agent problems.