An Empirical Research On Managerial Characteristics And Corporate Social Risk

Since the1980s, with the global corporate social responsibility of booming movement,corporate social responsibility has become a widespread community concern, companies arefacing a new risk, which we call "corporate social risk", so many countries in the world havebeen made laws and regulations in respect of corporate social responsibility. Moreover,since2008our country has been released a series of documents on corporate socialresponsibility and made "risk control ability" as one of the business performance evaluationcriteria of the managers in central enterprises. Managers as company strategic decisionmakers and management leaders play a vital role in the control of corporate social risk. Anexcellent management team will promote the company to actively fulfill their socialresponsibility and control corporate social risk to achieve the long-term development of thecompany.Based on the risk society theory, stakeholder theory, upper echelons theory andcorporate governance theory, this paper discusses the nature, characteristics and measuringmethod of corporate social risk, analyzes the relationship between managerial characteristicsand corporate social risk, then, we consider A-share listed companies in Shanghai exchangeand Shenzhen exchange between2008and2010as the samples to study the relationship. Wefind that managerial characteristics impact corporate social risk. Specifically, the proportionof male managers is negatively related to corporate social risk significantly, the average ageand "dual" leadership structure of the board of directors are positively related to corporatesocial risk significantly, the size of the board of directors and corporate social risk show " U"type relationship, however, the average education degree and the proportion of independentdirectors are negatively correlated, but not significantly. Further distinguishing the companylocation indicates that there are some different impacts among companies in differentregions by managerial characteristics on corporate social risk, mainly in the proportion ofmale managers, the average age and the size of the board of directors.