Research Briefs

Corporate citizenship not only has the potential to offset negative responses to a service failure, it can actually increase repurchase intentions, especially when the consumer is offered choices about how the company makes its social investments.

Firms with gender-diverse boards are more likely to have environmental policies that manage a greater number of environmental issues, especially when the firm operates in a highly polluting industry.

Companies marketing products with environmentally friendly attributes should communicate the importance of the green component to the overall product in order to maximize consumer perceptions of the product.

When seeking buy-in from executives, corporate citizenship practitioners should emphasize the business benefits.

The nature of a cause marketing campaign message—concrete or abstract—has an impact on consumers’ response and their likelihood to donate money or time.

Corporate citizenship investments focused on environmental performance, employee engagement, and customer/supplier issues strengthen firm financial performance.

In one of his recent quarterly letters, Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of the global investment management firm GMO, looks at the markets and the planet and offers both warning and encouragement for the future. Grantham warns a “desperate focus on growth” will lead to depletion and a global crash, but suggests the brain power exists to achieve planetary sustainability.

Researchers examining what motivates people to volunteer through their employer found employees have very different reasons to volunteer at work than in their personal lives. A study in the Journal of Business Ethics found that employee volunteers look for opportunities to help themselves and their employers while helping others.

Researchers studied management teams at 42 companies to examine whether differences in gender, tenure and functional backgrounds can form “fault lines” that harm organizational performance. They report in their article in Human Relations that strong shared objectives can overcome the potential fault lines of diverse teams and tap their potential strengths.

Researchers examined 35 earlier reputation studies to understand what factors affect the building and repairing of company reputations. Understanding the foundations of a reputation is critical to its successful restoration after a damaging event.

In a study of consumer and employee responses to corporate citizenship initiatives, researchers found that consumers and employees go through similar processes in understanding corporate citizenship and need to understand different aspects of the firm’s citizenship commitments. It also finds that employees often have a low awareness of a firm’s programs, making it difficult for the company to harness them as ambassadors for their companies’ efforts. As consumers learn about initiatives, the study finds, they tend to look for transparency about company motives.

Researchers reviewed social reports from 100 companies and found consistent themes across industries. This study also identifies management of pressures to meet stakeholder demands as a common primary goal of producing reports.