5. Discussion and conclusions
About the relationship between dimensions of CSP on CFP, there are several authors who believe that all social actions do not have the same effect on firm performance (Makni et al., 2009; Inoue and Lee, 2011), and therefore they consider necessary investigations that shed light on the effect of less aggregated measures of social performance (Hillman and Keim, 2001; Rose and Thomsen, 2004; Nelling and Webb, 2009). The relationship between some dimensions of CSP (environmental (Lioui and Sharma, 2012; Guenther et al., 2012), diversity (Golicic and Smith, 2013), consumer relations (Wang and Sarkis, 2013), community (Inoue and Lee, 2011), labour dimension (Fulmer et al., 2003)) and CFP have been studied, but the causality between these variables has hardly been analysed. The labour dimension of CSP is one of the least studied and with serious limitations in studies that address it.
The present study concludes that in the relationship between labour dimension of CSP (measure by LR) and CFP, higher LR could cause greater economic returns. This conclusion is supported by studies in other countries (Chauvin and Guthrie, 1994; Hannon and Milkovich, 1996; Lau and May, 1998; Ballou et al., 2003; Filbeck and Preece, 2003; Fulmer et al., 2003; Nelling and Webb, 2009), confirming the positive impact of reputation on the profitability and on business growth (Rose and Thomsen, 2004).
In the opposite sense, we conclude that CFP does not cause LR. In the academic literature, there are few previous researches to compare it, due to the literature gap about the labour dimension of CSP. As a reference, the work of Fulmer et al. (2003) also contrasted if a greater profitability cause greater LR, using the companies included in the ranking “100 best companies to work for in America”, and they did not found statistical evidence that the LR arises from increased CFP. The fact that higher availability of financial funds does not have a direct impact on the labour dimension of the CSP may be due to social investments in the workplace are not so evident as in other dimensions of CSP or because better working conditions are not necessarily associated with a monetary cost (since some of them are the result of organisational improvements, shift changes, or working conditions).
