Corporate social responsibility in micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises: Multigroup analysis of family vs. nonfamily firms

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015, includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. The SDGs set the agenda for trends in corporate social responsibility (CSR), which will gain momentum in the coming years; and businesses are the key agents of countries for the development of this agenda. The importance of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and family businesses in the economy of a country is unquestionable; however, there are very few studies on CSR that focus on MSMEs and even fewer that focus on family MSMEs. To fill this gap, this work seeks to ascertain whether the relationship between CSR and economic performance (EP) is significantly different for family and nonfamily MSMEs. To analyze the data, Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) is applied to the sample of 96 Spanish family MSMEs and 182 Spanish nonfamily MSMEs. The study presents an unprecedented finding: when making equal commitments to CSR, family MSMEs obtain a greater impact on their economic performance arising from CSR actions than nonfamily MSMEs. These findings have practical and theoretical implications for CSR in MSMEs. First, we found that when taking into account the economic, social and environmental dimensions for family and nonfamily MSMEs, CSR targets economic performance simultaneously. Second, family businesses have an additional incentive to become involved in CSR actions since these actions will be reflected to a greater extent in their economic results than those of nonfamily businesses.