The role of corporate social responsibility in promoting quality of life at work:a case study

Leal, Susana; Soares, Cátia

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.15/3046

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Authors

Leal, Susana

Soares, Cátia

Abstract(s)

Object: This work considers two areas of research, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and quality of life at work (QLW). CSR is “the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society. (...) Enterprises should have in place a process to integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders” (European Commission, 2011, p. 7). Fontinha et al. (2018) define QLW as the part of the global quality of life that is influenced by work. Swamy et al. (2015) define it as the extent to which a worker is satisfied with personal and work needs through participation in the workplace while achieving the organisation's goals. This research aims to investigate whether an organization's social responsibility practices can influence employees' QLW. Methodology: Through a case study applied to a social economy organization, a sample of 84 employees was obtained (81.9% women; 36.1% have secondary education; 17.8% hold management positions) who answered to a questionnaire survey. The measurement of CSR practices was carried out through the questionnaire made available by GRACE (2014), covering five areas: (a) management responsibility, (b) responsibility for employees, (c) responsibility in the value chain, (d) responsibility for the community and (e) responsibility for the environment. QLW was evaluated by Rueda et al. (2013)'s quality of life assessment scale, which includes four dimensions: (a) integration, respect, and autonomy, (b) fair and adequate compensation, (c) leisure and social interaction possibilities, (d) incentive and support. The two scales were submitted to exploratory factorial analyses and the Cronbach Alphas were calculated. The data were analyzed using correlation coefficients and linear hierarchical regressions. Originality: There are very few works that relate CSR to QLW. Organisations that develop social responsibility (SR) practices towards their employees, such as fair and adequate remuneration, support to their families and job security, create desirable employment situations for their employees, thus increasing their and their families' QLW (Bohdanowicz & Zientara, 2009; Kim et al., 2017). Results: After controlling the effect of gender, age, seniority, schooling and occupying (or not) management positions, the following results were obtained: (a) SR towards the community positively influences integration, respect, and autonomy; (b) SR related to values and ethics positively influences the fair and adequate compensation dimension and global QLW. The older the employees, the greater the perception of QLW in the dimensions of fair and adequate compensation, possibilities of leisure and social interaction, and global QLW. Practical implications: The results can be used to define more effective strategies to promote employees' QLW. Limitations: Given the way the data were obtained, problems may occur regarding the variance of the common method (Podsakoff et al., 2003).

Keywords

Quality of life at work Corporate Social Responsibility

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.15/3046

Citation

Leal, S. & Soares, C. (2020). The role of corporate social responsibility in promoting quality of life at work: a case study [Conference session]. ICABM 2020 – 3rd International Conference of Applied Business and Management, Porto, Portugal.