Research On The Relationship Between Corporte Culture And Corporate Performance: A Corporate Social Responsibility Perspective

Corporate social responsibility is deficient seriously at the same time that China's enterprises develop continuously. With the SA8000 put forward, the production code of large multinational companies formulated, China's energy-saving and emission reduction strategies implemented, and the new "Labor Law" promulgated, corporate taking social responsibility has become an irreversible trend. Michael·Porter has proposed that corporate can impose a positive impact on the community and reap huge business returns by taking social responsibility strategically. So it is of great significance for China's enterprises and economic development that how to promote corporate social responsibility behavior and transform corporate social responsibility into business performance.In the Research of corporate social responsibility, some scholars focused on the factors affecting corporate social responsibility behavior, such as external environment, company's age and size, and others discussed the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate performance, but they did not form a unified conclusion. This study suggested that the corporate culture should be a factor impacting on corporate social responsibility behavior because only when companies incorporate the idea of corporate social responsibility into their values and culture can they undertake social responsibility actively over a long period of time and improve their performance effectively. On the other hand, though some scholars explored the influence that the corporate culture imposes on corporate performance, but none of them analyzed the relationship between corporate culture and business performance from the perspective of corporate social responsibility. In response to the lack of those researches, this paper regarded corporate culture as an antecedent of corporate social responsibility behavior, and looked upon corporate social responsibility as an intermediary of corporate culture and performance. Moreover, this study dissected the mechanisms and effects among variables theoretically and empirically.This paper defined and classified the dimensions of corporate culture and social responsibility, built a model of corporate culture, social responsibility and performance, and then proposed the assumptions among variables. After theoretical and quantitative analysis, some important results and conclusions are presented as follows:(1)corporate culture has a significant impact on corporate social responsibility actions, and different characteristics have different impact; (2)corporate social responsibility affects business performance significantly. Furthermore, the significance of every dimension of corporate social responsibility is different in influencing corporate performance; (3) corporate social responsibility is the important way and intermediate variable for corporate culture affecting enterprise performance.Based on "corporate culture- corporate social responsibility -corporate performance", the theoretical framework of this paper, it tried to make research progress in the following three aspects:(1)this article described qualitatively and measured quantitatively the cultural characteristics and the dimensions of corporate social responsibility of China's manufacturing enterprises; (2)This study not only built a theoretical model on corporate culture, corporate social responsibility and business performance, but also took a quantitative analysis for the model; (3)the article used corporate social responsibility as an intermediary variable and analyzed the relationship between corporate culture and business performance.Of course, regardless of some academic attainments, the study still remains many shortcomings. In the last part of this paper, the author presents the limitations of this study and several issues that need to study in the future.