Differences in attitude to corporate social responsibility among generations

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate the employees’ attitudes to CSR practices and reveal the differences in staff perceptions within different groups of responadents. The tasks to be accomplished are: (1) to investigate the differences of CSR perception between males and females; (2) to investigate the differences of CSR perception among representatives of different generations; (3) to investigate the differences of CSR perception among representatives of different sectors of the economy. The online survey was conducted using the authors’ developed research instrument (questionnaire). In total, 129 respondents—employed Latvian citizens—participated in the survey. To assess the influence of age, gender, and other control characteristics in the sample, the authors implemented regression-based moderation analysis in the SPSS environment. The analysis indicated the moderating role of gender in the perception of corporate social responsibility, which appeared to be strong, especially in terms of leveraging business honesty, as a predictor. The sector, too, appeared to be a moderator, though it was much less statistically significant than gender. On the other hand, generation appeared to be an independent and significant predictor of corporate social responsibility perception itself, while its moderating effect was insignificant. The findings in the paper support existing literature in terms of moderating the role of gender, as outlined previously; yet, this research estimated that males value corporate social responsibility higher than females, while our results estimate the opposite. Our research revealed that age (generation) is a significant factor, which defines a personal attitude towards corporate social responsibility, i.e., the older generation values CSR higher than the youngsters. We have not found any correlation between the economic sector and corporate social responsibility perception.