The Study On The Impact Of The Inconsistent Corporate Social Responsibility Behavior On Its Reputation

As awareness of people on Corporate Social Responsibility(henceforth,CSR)increases,the impact of CSR behavior on corporate reputation is also increasingly significant.The fulfillment of CSR can help companies win the trust of stakeholders,enhance their brand competitiveness and create value for them.However,when the actual CSR behavior deviates from the psychological expectations of stakeholders,CSR activities may be negatively evaluated by them,which may result in negative impacts such as damaged reputation and falling stock prices.This paper divides the inconsistent behavior of CSR into three types,including inconsistent statement and behavior,inconsistency between one CSR dimension and another(inconsistency between two sequential CSR behaviors)and the consistency between statement and behavior but over-hyped(inconsistency between behavior and motivation).Through obtaining sample data from questionnaires,this paper empirically tests the impact of these three inconsistent behaviors on corporate reputation and also study two different CSR dimensions,which are product security and philanthropy representing economic CSR and non-economic CSR respectively in hopes of exploring the difference in the effect of different CSR dimension on corporate reputation.In addition,this paper study the difference in impact on corporate reputation between sequence of good deeds and bad deeds.The findings strongly support the fact that all the three types of inconsistent CSR behavior lead to the negative effect on corporate reputation.However,the effects are not the same between the CSR behaviors of different dimension.The negative effect tend to be stronger on the inconsistent behavior of economic CSR than non-economic CSR.Furthermore,compared with the situation when bad deeds take place before good deeds,the negative effect on corporate reputation is stronger if bad deeds follow good deeds.The research results provide experience and suggestions that how companies correctly perform their social responsibilities and avoid inconsistent social responsibility behaviors that may negatively impact corporate reputation to gain a benign understanding of the market.