Are the sins of the father the sins of the sons, but not the daughters? Exploring how leadership gender and generation impact the corporate social responsibility of franchise firms

Fernández-Muiños, M., Money, K., Saraeva, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2223-4310, Garnelo-Gomez, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8391-3221 and Vázquez-Suárez, L. (2022) Are the sins of the father the sins of the sons, but not the daughters? Exploring how leadership gender and generation impact the corporate social responsibility of franchise firms. Sustainability, 14 (14). 8574. ISSN 2071-1050 doi: 10.3390/su14148574

Abstract/Summary

Emerging literature suggests that male leaders guide their companies more towards operations-related (OR) Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and female leaders lead their compa- nies more towards non-operation-related (Non-OR) CSR activities. Nevertheless, very little research has considered intergenerational issues in CSR practices. This study explores this question in a context unexplored to date, the franchise industry. We apply multivariate analysis to explore differences between franchisor leaders. Our results reveal that successor leaders engage their companies more in normative CSR than founding leaders. Contrary to our expectations, they also encourage more instrumental CSR activities compared to the founders. We found that female leaders promote nor- mative CSR practices to a greater extent than their male counterparts. However, gender differences in instrumental CSR were only present for the group of current leaders, where men outperformed women. When we delved into the analyses by looking at the influence of the gender of the previous founder, we found that female heirs engage their companies at the same levels of instrumental CSR as their male heir counterparts. Implications for CSR practices in franchise firms and directions for future research are discussed.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/106222
Identification Number/DOI	10.3390/su14148574
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Henley Business School > Digitalisation, Marketing and Entrepreneurship Henley Business School > Leadership, Organisations, Behaviour and Reputation
Publisher	MPDI
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