Measuring Corporate Social Responsibility for competitive success at a regional level

The relevance of Corporate Social Responsibility in the business world is enhanced by its linkage with other variables of strategic nature in the firmʹs activity. For this purpose, the objective of the paper is to define an overall scale to cover their different dimensions, social, economic, and environmental, by analyzing the cause–effect relations with performance and competitive success. This under researched topic has been studied in a sample of 67 medium and big firms within a specific regional context, a pioneer region in Europe which is starting to promote responsible business behaviour by the regional government. For that, structural equation methodology based on partial least squares path modelling has been applied. The results show the positive, direct and significant effect of social responsibility orientation of firms to competitive success and the mediating effect of performance. The established set of indicators that define Corporate Social Responsibility provides a simple and useful guidance for responsible actions implementation to upgrade regional competitive success.