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Decay and Recovery of CSR Routines in Franchise Organizations

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Benjamin Lawrence at Georgia State University
Benjamin Lawrence
Brett Massimino
Brett Massimino
Brett Massimino
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Jie J Zhang at University of Victoria
Jie J Zhang
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Abstract and Figures

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities have become increasingly prevalent in retail settings. In franchised organizations, franchisors typically design and coordinate these activities, leaving operational execution to franchisees. Meanwhile, franchisors may introduce new corporate-led CSR activities over time. Even though changes to CSR activities may refocus outlets’ attention on a CSR initiative, they may also disrupt an outlet’s ongoing CSR routines. Using a longitudinal, secondary dataset consisting of an eight-year panel for a national, franchised restaurant chain, we examine CSR performance dynamics in the presence of two distinct types of CSR activities: an ongoing CSR routine and a distinct, temporary CSR campaign. We find that, when resuming the CSR routine after a temporary CSR campaign, outlets’ performance in CSR routines drops significantly (i.e., immediate decay), then improves gradually (i.e., protracted recovery). We also consider the moderating role of an outlet’s experience, finding that experience stabilizes these decay and recovery cycles. Our findings represent a first step in developing a longitudinal understanding of how a firm’s short-term CSR campaigns may impact ongoing CSR routines, thus contributing to the knowledge of CSR activity development and routinization.
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Business Ethics (2024) 193:589–610
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05592-w
ORIGINAL PAPER
Decay andRecovery ofCSR Routines inFranchise Organizations
BenjaminLawrence1· BrettMassimino2· JieJ.Zhang3
Received: 23 January 2023 / Accepted: 2 December 2023 / Published online: 13 January 2024
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities have become increasingly prevalent in retail settings. In franchised organiza-
tions, franchisors typically design and coordinate these activities, leaving operational execution to franchisees. Meanwhile,
franchisors may introduce new corporate-led CSR activities over time. Even though changes to CSR activities may refocus
outlets’ attention on a CSR initiative, they may also disrupt an outlet’s ongoing CSR routines. Using a longitudinal, secondary
dataset consisting of an eight-year panel for a national, franchised restaurant chain, we examine CSR performance dynamics
in the presence of two distinct types of CSR activities: an ongoing CSR routine and a distinct, temporary CSR campaign.
We find that, when resuming the CSR routine after a temporary CSR campaign, outlets’ performance in CSR routines drops
significantly (i.e., immediate decay), then improves gradually (i.e., protracted recovery). We also consider the moderating
role of an outlet’s experience, finding that experience stabilizes these decay and recovery cycles. Our findings represent a
first step in developing a longitudinal understanding of how a firm’s short-term CSR campaigns may impact ongoing CSR
routines, thus contributing to the knowledge of CSR activity development and routinization.
Keywords CSR routinization· CSR performance· Franchise· Routine recovery· Routine switch
Introduction
The maintenance of organizational routines has been high-
lighted as an important element of corporate social respon-
sibility (CSR) implementation (Yuan etal., 2011) as well as
an effective franchise strategy (Knott, 2003; Maalouf etal.,
2020). Successful CSR initiatives often require organiza-
tional members’ continued adherence with CSR routines.
For example, in the retail sector, checkout charity programs
require consistent requests for a charitable donation at the
time of checkout. However, CSR routinization is made more
complex in franchise organizations given their dispersed,
decentralized organizational structures and the allocation
of unit level decision making authority (Meiseberg & Ehr-
mann, 2012).
Generally speaking, the ability to create, disseminate, and
synthesize routines may form a primary basis for franchis-
ing’s value (Knott, 2003), at least in terms of the business’s
core routines which are based on increased economies of
scale in operations and supply chain activities in franchise
organizations (Lawrence etal., 2021). However, measuring
and reporting on social impact is challenging (Barnett etal.,
2020), as CSR routines may have different performance
dynamics than core business routines.
Performance metrics for CSR vary by the type of activity
being performed (Stobierski, 2021). Previous work exam-
ining environmental and ethical dimensions of CSR, for
instance, measures CSR performance by the investments
an organization makes in CSR activities (Lindgreen etal.,
2009). In this paper, we focus on CSR routines in the phil-
anthropic dimension that organizations perform to generate
contributions to causes or charities (for example Carroll,
1991; Okeudo, 2012). The performance of a philanthropic
CSR routine is measured by its output, that is, how well it
meets the objective of contributing to the cause or charity
* Benjamin Lawrence
blawrence@gsu.edu
Brett Massimino
bjmassimino@vcu.edu
Jie J. Zhang
jiezhang@uvic.edu
1 Robinson College ofBusiness, Georgia State University,
Atlanta, USA
2 School ofBusiness, Virginia Commonwealth University,
Richmond, USA
3 Gustavson School ofBusiness, University ofVictoria,
Victoria, Canada
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