Įmonių socialinės atsakomybės poveikio finansinei rizikai, atsižvelgiant į suinteresuotųjų grupių veiksmus, vertinimas

Abstract

Nowadays Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an important factor allowing companies to combine different stakeholder groups, meet the needs of society and the environment and ensure the stable operation of the company. At the same time the biggest risk for companies is unsatisfied stakeholders, that make pressure to companies for theirs benefits. There are four main arguments concerning the relationship between CSR and financial risks. These arguments include the theories that explain CSR and stakeholders actions. It includes stakeholder groups, limited resources, social movement and opportunistic behavior theories. From the analysis of all these theories it is obvious that the assumptions of CSR impact on financial risk is mixed. Stakeholder theory suggests that CSR helps companies to reduce conflict situations with stakeholders and ensure the appropriate level of resources. Therefore, CSR can reduce financial risk. On the other hand, limited resources and the opportunistic behavior theories suggest that managers, for their own benefit may increase spending on social programs, thus unnecessarily increasing costs and reducing the company’s positive cash flows. Also, based on the limited resources theory, companies make distinctions between relevant and less important stakeholders and their needs, as these stakeholders provide more or less important resources. That is why, based on oportunistic behaviour and limited reources theory CSR possibly may increase financial risk. Corporate social responsibility and business’s risk interdependence has been investigated in four ways. Some authors examine corporate social responsibility as a company’s risk reduction mechanism (Godfrey et al., 2009; Tsoutsoura, 2004; Testa, 2008; Kytle and Ruggie, 2005), on the other hand, corporate social responsibility is examined as a separate business risk (Heugens and Dentchev, 2007).[...]