Abstract

Social demands for corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been increasing in recent years. Organizations understand the need to follow socially responsible behavior to receive stakeholder support. In addition, the application of CSR principles within human resources (HR) management has become more relevant, and more empirical research is needed. In fact, enterprises will be considered legitimate if they are viewed as socially embedded not only externally but also internally. Under this scenario, the main objective of this research is to analyze the relationship between the implementation of socially responsible HR management and organizational legitimacy. Furthermore, the relevance and performance of diverse CSR policies will be analyzed through the implementation of the importance-performance matrix (IPMA). For this purpose, the evaluations made by 157 CSR experts on approximately 30 multinational companies are considered. PLS-SEM is applied to the data and shows a strong and positive relationship between CSR practices focused on employees and organizational legitimacy. The results offer relevant information for company managers to improve their resource optimization and internal stakeholder management through the correct and efficient introduction of CSR policies.

1. Introduction

In today’s markets, organizations need to manage their relationships with stakeholders to create value and mutual benefits (Horisch et al., ¨ 2014; Freudenreich et al., 2020). Freeman (1984) introduced the stakeholder theory concept, which identifies diverse organizational interests and shows the importance of not only being profitable but also of understanding and caring about the impact that corporate activities have on different audiences.

Stakeholder groups are affected by organizations’ behavior and actions; however, it is important to understand that these actions also impact corporations’ stability (Silva et al., 2019). In fact, organizational viability strongly depends on the ability to satisfy stakeholders’ needs and understand their perceptions (Ulmer and Sellnow, 2000). Thus, if enterprises want to be successful in the medium-to-long term, they must identify the full range of these needs and be able to build lasting relationships with their stakeholder base (Dmytriyev et al., 2021).