Corporate social responsibility initiatives and its impact on social license: some empirical perspectives

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to understand the driving forces of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in organizations and how these social initiatives influence organizations’ “license to operate” using data from the Ghanaian business environment. Design/methodology/approach - This study used purposive sampling with a well-structured questionnaire as a data collection tool. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used to study the driving forces of CSR initiatives in organizations and how these social initiatives influence their social license. Findings - The findings indicate that CSR initiatives are driven by the normative, mimetic, investors and community pressures. The regulative pressure has no significant effect on CSR initiatives. The authors found no difference between the services and the manufacturing sectors as far as the results are concerned using multi-grouping analysis. Research limitations/implications - From the results, the importance of normative, mimetic, investors and community pressures as the driving forces of CSR are established. The finding indicates that CSR demands by suppliers, customers the extent to which organizations perceive their competitors have benefited from initiating CSR are benefiting, the willingness of investors to invest in companies whose CSR activities are best and the opinion on the extent to which the District Assembly and the Chief Executive in the district, the Chiefs, the Churches, the Opinion leaders have significant impact on CSR initiatives. Practical implications - The results indicate the need for suppliers and customers to continually demand from corporations to initiate CSR activities as organizations seem to respond to these pressures, and these initiatives are also likely to be mimicked by other organizations in the same industry to enable this drive the social responsibility agenda. Investors and community members are also encouraged to invest and accept, respectively, organizations with very good CSR records to send a signal to companies who see CSR as a cost instead of performance enhancement. Originality/value - The work illustrates and provides some insights and builds on the literature in the area of CSR from a developing country’s environment. This is also one of the few works that investigate the driving forces of CSR and social license using the institutional theory based on data from the African business environment.