Corporate Social Responsibility Activity Combinations for Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Korean Firms

We examine how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities yield high performance in Korean companies by addressing two related questions to expand our limited knowledge. First, what combinations of CSR activities yield high performance? Second, how do CSR activities form an interdependent system based on different corporate contexts? We draw the 2012–2018 data from the Korean Economic Justice Institute index for a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results reveal several effective CSR activity factor combinations under the given strategies and management environments. Companies with a high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with a low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies with a low financial performance from CSR activities, most of the causal pathways focus only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities’ combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies’ strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.