There has been a long-standing debate on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial performance. An aura of mystery surrounds this relationship due to the mix of inconclusive, positive and negative results in existing research. This thesis aims to explore the same relationship but uses the customers of the organisations under study as the unit of analysis. A model has been constructed that aims to explain satisfaction with a socially responsible company in terms of the social responsibility of the individual customer, the customer's perception of what corporate citizenship should be, an appreciation of the company's values and the reputation of the company. Satisfaction is also hypothesised to lead to wider use of the company's services and to greater profit for the company. Thus one contribution from this work is to explain the link from social responsibility to profitability in terms of a fit between the customer's personal characteristics and the reputation of the company. The empirical setting for the research is two banks, The Co-operative Bank and smile, both operated by Co-operative Financial Services. The model was successfully tested on empirical data from a survey of the customers of both banks using Structural Equation Modelling. In all 3500 customers were surveyed. In order to test the model two measurement scales have also been developed, one to measure what has been labelled as socially responsible consumerism and another to measure corporate citizenship. The socially responsible consumerism scale focuses on understanding an individual's orientation to a socially responsible lifestyle. The corporate citizenship scale focuses on how an individual views a company's actions, specifically how he would want the company to behave. The results show that there is a strong relationship between socially responsible consumerism and corporate citizenship, i.e. the more a person is socially responsible in his personal life the more he expects the company he is dealing with to be a good corporate citizen and the higher are the ratings for the company and its reputation. Higher reputation leads to greater satisfaction with the provider and the purchase of more services. Higher satisfaction in tum leads to greater customer account profitability. The research concludes that (at least within its context) there is a positive link between good corporate citizenship and corporate performance and this link can be explained by the attraction of a socially responsible company to those who are themselves more responsible in their personal behaviour.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:529921 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Sindhwani, Saumya |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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