The impact of corporate social responsibility decoupling on financial performance: the role of customer structure and operational slack
研究了企业社会责任报告与实际实践不一致（脱耦）对财务绩效的负面影响，发现客户稳定性和运营冗余能缓解这种负面效应，而客户集中度会加剧它。
Purpose Corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling indicates a misalignment between how firms report CSR and what firms actually practice with respect to CSR. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between CSR decoupling and financial performance and the factors affecting this relationship. Design/methodology/approach This paper collects and combines secondary panel data from multiple sources of Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2020 to test the direct impact of CSR decoupling on firms’ financial performance and the moderating role of customer structure and operational slack. Findings This paper finds that CSR decoupling is negatively associated with firms’ financial performance. These findings further suggest that the negative relationship can be suppressed by customer stability and operational slack, but amplified by customer concentration. These conclusions remain robust to alternate measures of independent and dependent variables and narrower samples. Originality/value In the literature, the effect of CSR on firms’ financial performance is inconclusive. This is the first study to examine the impact of CSR decoupling on firms’ financial performance and the factors affecting this relationship. This paper contributes to the CSR decoupling literature from an operations and supply chain management perspective.