The relationship between environmental governance and other dimensions of corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a multidimensional concept, which raises the question as to whether strong performance in one dimension predicts strong performance in other dimensions. This work sought to determine the nature and strength of relationships between business ethics, business´s code for social management, and investment in the community dimensions of CSR and its environmental governance dimension. The entire system of hypothesized direct and indirect relationships among the four variables was modeled using structural equations modeling on IBM® SPSS® AMOS. Several path analyses were tested using maximum likelihood estimations of the parameters in the model. Hypothesis testing was conducted on the entire system of equations and on each coefficient. The results show that investment in the community and the code for social management in the business, have direct positive effects on the environmental governance rating. However, the bossiness ethics interacts with it only indirectly, via its direct effects on both the business social code and its investment in the community. The magnitudes of the effects of these two variables are more or less similar at 0.286 and 0.269, respectively. In conclusion, for the corporates rated in the “Maala” index, a strong performance in the human rights and working place dimension and in the community investment dimension, predicts strong performance in the environmental dimension.