The role of board gender and foreign ownership in the CSR performance of Chinese listed firms

By P. McGuinness, João Paulo Vieito, Mingzhu Wang. 2017

819 citations recorded by the source corpus.

China's recent promotion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has coincided with a marked increase in the number of Chinese listed firms attracting female board members and foreign equity investors. Using Rankins' (RKS) ratings over the 2009 to 2013 period, we show that greater gender balance in top-management supports stronger CSR performance. This finding broadens gender-based accounts emphasizing social networks (Westphal and Milton, 2000), Critical Mass Theory (Kramer et al., 2006; Bear et al., 2010; and Soares et al., 2011) and team dynamics (Woolley et al., 2010; and Hoogendoorn et al., 2013). Findings also reveal stronger CSR performance in firms where a female officer is present at the CEO and/or vice-CEO level. Female leadership thus appears to be just as important as gender mix in driving CSR change. Our findings shed new light and add further dimension to the nascent literature on gender and CSR-engagement in China (Lau et al., 2016; and Liao et al., 2016).

Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/417d2140cb6d8f22ba9862dc8e2ed280e8bf3e85

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In Accounting

1. M. Atif
2. S. Fosu
3. Farid Ullah
4. Mohammed Hossain
5. Çiğdem Vural-Yavaş
6. Tianlong Wu
7. Ping Wang
8. Samsul Alam

In Gender Studies

1. M. Atif
2. Mohammed Hossain
3. Tianlong Wu
4. Ping Wang
5. Samsul Alam
6. Collins G. Ntim
7. M. Goergen
8. Zhe Li

In Strategy and Management

1. S. Fosu
2. Farid Ullah
3. M. Atif
4. Çiğdem Vural-Yavaş
5. Mohammed Hossain
6. Tianlong Wu
7. Ping Wang
8. Samsul Alam

Citations in the corpus

• Environmental policy, environmental performance, and financial distress in China: Do top management team characteristics matter? (2018, methodology): “Overall, our results relating to the descriptive statistics are in line with those of the relevant previous studies (Lau et al., 2016; Marquis and Qian, 2014; McGuinness et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2010).”
• The Impact of Board Gender Diversity and Foreign Institutional Investors on the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Engagement of Chinese Listed Companies (2019, background): “According to [Khan and Vieito [79], Abdullah, Mohamed [80]], some other variables may also have a relationship with CSR engagement, and these variables include the board size, the independent directors, the CEO power (duality), the board member meetings frequency, the board member average age, the s”
• Economic policy uncertainty, stakeholder engagement, and environmental, social, and governance practices: The moderating effect of competition (2020, background): “McGuinness et al. (2017) use return on equity as a profitability measure and document a negatively significant effect on CSR of Chinese firms.”
• Do foreign institutional investors drive corporate social responsibility? Evidence from listed firms in China (2020, methodology): “…are obtained from the RKS rating system,7 which details the contents of CSR-related activities and fully covers Chinese listed firms issuing CSR or sustainability reports (Elmagrhi et al., 2019; Lau, Lu, & Liang, 2016; Luo, Wang, & Zhang, 2017; Marquis & Qian, 2014; McGuinness et al., 2017).”
• Does board gender diversity affect renewable energy consumption? (2020, background): “Such firms also tend to have a greater environmental CSR orientation (e.g., Hafsi and Turgut, 2013; Larrieta- Rubín de Celis et al., 2015; Al-Shaer and Zaman, 2016).”