Conclusion
The practice of CSR has gone beyond the conventional individual firm's practices. It has become a global phenomenon and a thriving corporate governance concept and management strategy in most multinationals. Although, while the motivation behind firms’ investment in CSR has been an unresolved issue for which previous research has yielded mixed results (Gras-Gil et al., 2016), this paper has been able to provide empirical evidence on the effect of CSR investment and disclosure on the financial performance of banks in Nigeria. This paper has also added to the growing number of CSR studies in developing countries by focusing on the Nigerian banking industry, which has lacked sufficient research of a CSR nature despite the industry's imperative contributions to the development of the Nigerian economy. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that in the context of the Nigerian banking industry, legitimacy, rather than financial benefits may be the key motivation behind banks’ investments in CSR activities. As it were, the banking industry is distinctive because its operations do not cause any harm to the society nor degradation to the environment like the oil and gas industry as well as the manufacturing industry. Hence, banks’ motivations for investing in CSR activities may be quite different from that of other industries like the oil and gas industry, and may be best explained within the legitimacy theory.
