Motives for corporate social responsibility

In this article we analyze the motives of executives to take responsibility for the labor, environmental and social aspects of their business. We distinguish three motives: one extrinsic (financial) and two intrinsic (ethical and altruistic) motives and empirically investigate the influences of these motives on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by means of a sample of 473 executives. The estimation results show that for social aspects of CSR, executives are significantly more driven by intrinsic motives than by the extrinsic motive. But also for environmental aspects of CSR intrinsic motives provide stronger stimulus than the extrinsic motive.