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Corporate Social Performance As a Competitive Advantage in Attracting a Quality Workforce

SAGE Publications Inc
Business & Society
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Abstract

Several researchers have suggested that a talented, quality workforce will become a more important source of competitive advantage for firms in the future. Drawing on social identity theory and signaling theory, the authors hypothesize that firms can use their corporate social performance (CSP) activities to attract job applicants. Specifically, signaling theory suggests that a firm’s CSP sends signals to prospective job applicants about what it would be like to work for a firm. Social identity theory suggests that job applicants have higher self-images whenworking for socially responsive firms over their less responsive counterparts. The authors conducted an experiment in which they manipulated CSP and found that prospective job applicants are more likely to pursue jobs from socially responsible firms than from firms with poor social performance reputations. The implications of these findings for academicians and practitioners alike are discussed.
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Corporate social performance as a competitive advantage in attracting a quali...
Daniel W Greening; Daniel B Turban
Business and Society; Sep 2000; 39, 3; ABI/INFORM Global
pg. 254
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... Organizations that operate in countries with greater availability of intellectual capital are more likely to have greater environmental disclosure, because the consumer market and other stakeholders are more demanding (Ioannou and Serafeim, 2012;Rosati and Faria, 2019). Despite these previous findings, the study by Greening and Turban (2000) showed that this positive relationship between availability of qualified labor and environmental disclosure may not apply to developed economies, as is the case in our sample. According to Greening and Turban (2000), as the availability of qualified labor is high in developed economies, companies do not use environmental disclosure to attract qualified professionals. ...
... Despite these previous findings, the study by Greening and Turban (2000) showed that this positive relationship between availability of qualified labor and environmental disclosure may not apply to developed economies, as is the case in our sample. According to Greening and Turban (2000), as the availability of qualified labor is high in developed economies, companies do not use environmental disclosure to attract qualified professionals. Therefore, we defend a nondirectional hypothesis: ...
... In view of this, our findings reinforce the research by Greening and Turban (2000), which found that in developed countries the availability of qualified professionals is not a determining factor for environmental disclosure. Another reason for this finding is that, through institutional complementarity, we tested this variable for both economic models (liberal and coordinated). ...
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Thesis
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