Top Management Team’s Overseas Backgrounds And Corporate Social Responsibility

With the continuous development of enterprises,more and more external negative effects have begun to emerge,such as food safety,environmental pollution problems.It has also aroused people’s wide attention to corporate social responsibility.According to the upper echelon theory knowledge,manager’s personality will affect the decision-making behavior of the enterprise.As a result,many scholars begin to study the impact of manager’s age,gender and psychological characteristics on corporate social responsibility.By cultural schemata theory knowledge,the different life experiences and cultural backgrounds of managers also have great influence on their individual social cognition,cognitive abilities and values,and will affect the culure environment and decision-making of the enterprise.Many studies also show culure differences will affect the decision-making and performance behaviors of the enterprise,such as merger and acquisitions,agencies costs and corporate social responsibility performances.But now those from managers’ overseas backgrounds to study its influence on the social practice of enterprise are not much,and those researches just studied the cross section data of foreign enterprises,and didn’t study from culture perspective.Therefore,based on cultural schema theory and high-level echelon theory,this paper attempts to study from the perspective of cultural differences,selects the 2008-2014 A-share listed companies in our country as the research object,sorts executive team overseas backgrounds data from CSMAR database and enterprise annual report,as the proxy variable of cultural differences,and uses the third party agencies rating which calls Ranking CSR Ratings to measure corporate social responsibility.On the basis of the domestic and foreign relevant literatures review and theoretical analysis,this paper puts forward the hypothesis and establishes the research model,conducts the empirical study of the relationship between executive team overall overseas backgrounds,CEO’s overseas backgrounds and corporate social responsibility.The empirical results show that executive team overall overseas backgrounds,CEO personal overseas backgrounds all have a positive impact on corporate social responsibility rating,which means when the executive team has overseas backgrounds members,it can improve the corporate social responsibility performance.When the firm is a state-owned enterprise or a short-established new business,the positive impact of executive team’s overseas backgrounds on corporate social responsibility rating will be enhanced.From the perspective of cultural differences,this paper confirms the positive correlation between executive team’s overseas backgrounds and corporate social responsibility by means of theoretical analysis and empirical test,which enriches the research contents of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility and is of great significance both in theory and in practice.