Non-market strategies and firms’ organizational performance. Evidence from the energy sector in Sub-Saharan Africa
研究了撒哈拉以南非洲能源企业中，企业政治活动与战略企业社会责任如何单独或共同影响经济绩效和资源获取，发现两者在政治不稳定环境中共同提升绩效，但单独使用效果有限。
• CSR and CPA have a complex, asymmetric relationship with organizational performance. • CSR and CPA jointly enhance economic performance in politically unstable contexts. • Organizational performance is not attainable in stable contexts without CPA or CSR. • sub-Saharan Africa initiatives require an accurate design of non-market strategy. • Our results are obtained from the joint use of econometric and configurational methods. Firms increasingly employ non-market strategies (NMS), including corporate political activity (CPA) and strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR). Yet, the literature has not come to univocal hypotheses on how and under what conditions NMS, alone or jointly, enhances organizational performance. By adopting an econometric simulation, corroborated by a fsQCA analysis, we unveil various configurations that combine CSR and CPA strategies, with different dimensions of firms’ performance (namely, economic results and access to resources) and the country’s institutional climate. Our analysis relies on a sample of companies that invested in electricity infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2014. Our findings confirm the complex causal nexus between NMS and the firm’s performance. Neither CPA nor CSR alone is sufficient to achieve high organizational performance, but their co-presence is associated with the enhancement of both types of performance, especially in politically unstable environments. Asymmetrically, organizational performances are hindered by the lack of one or the other NMS, independently of the political climate.