When Does It Pay to be Good? Moderators and Mediators in the Corporate Sustainability–Corporate Financial Performance Relationship: A Critical Review

By Sylvia Grewatsch, Ingo Kleindienst. 2017

352 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we review the literature on moderators and mediators in the corporate sustainability (CS)–corporate financial performance (CFP) relationship. We provide some clarity on what has been learned so far by taking a contingency perspective on this much-researched relationship. Overall, we find that this research has made some progress in the past. However, we also find this research stream to be characterized by three major shortcomings, namely low degree of novelty, missing investment in theory building, and a lack of research design and measurement options. To address these shortcomings, we suggest avenues for future research. Beyond that we also argue for a stronger emphasis on the strategic perspective of CS. In particular, we propose future research to take a step back and aim for an integration of the CS–CFP relationship into the strategic management literature.

Subfields: Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8afefd6a9d9c15b3f87ebee2634f9995de48f3b4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Nilesh Khare
2. S. Cho
3. E. Akben-Selcuk
4. Jason Young
5. A. Alshehhi
6. C. Chung
7. Haitham Nobanee

In Strategy and Management

1. Nilesh Khare
2. S. Cho
3. E. Akben-Selcuk
4. Jason Young
5. A. Alshehhi
6. C. Chung
7. Haitham Nobanee

Citations in the corpus

• Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: The Moderating Role of Ownership Concentration in Turkey (2019, background): “Moreover, Grewatsch and Kleindienst [28] called for more studies on the mediators and moderators of CSR–financial performance relationship.”
• The Impact of Sustainability Practices on Corporate Financial Performance: Literature Trends and Future Research Potential (2018, background): “Those publications that are ranked as Q1 or Q2 in Scopus and A* or A in ABDC list were included in this review [19].”
• Study on the Relationship between CSR and Financial Performance (2019, methodology): “Second, using a different proxy for firm size other than the current one (natural log of total assets) might improve test results and ensure robustness [124,125].”