| This qualitative study used Delphi methodology to determine the criteria recognized and used by U.S. corporate executives in evaluating corporate social responsibility (CSR). A panel of 35 corporate executives from high technology companies in the Silicon Valley of California participated in the study. The research provided valuable resources for the field of corporate leadership. Recently, some intriguing research has been conducted concerning CSR in use. While these studies attempt to move beyond the philosophical, speculative, and prescriptive tendency characterizing most of the literature in CSR, no studies have examined CSR criteria from the corporate executive's perspective. Moreover, to date there still is no research that supports whether the criteria used (if used) by corporate executives, as agents of corporations, is in agreement with the various criteria used by theorists and organizational observers to evaluate and measure corporate performance in the area of social responsibility. The results of the present study were four-fold. Through qualitative coding of the panelists' feedback, descriptive criteria emerged. Firstly, although panelists acknowledge shareholders as important stakeholders, they appear to take a broader, more current perspective of corporate stakeholders. Secondly, while the shareholder is their top-named stakeholder, the panelists identified providing quality products and services as their top-named obligation, and left profit out of the obligation ranking completely. Thirdly, the executives cite as their top CSR criteria, abiding by laws, customer satisfaction, acting with integrity and employee retention. Fourthly, there was only a moderate level of agreement between executives and outside CSR observers/researchers on appropriate CSR evaluating criteria. |
