Emotionality of managers as a personality character and corporate social responsibility

The present paper aims to explore the relationship between the emotionality of firm managers as a personality character and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Personality is a pattern of social behavior and social interrelations, so an individual’s personality is a set of ways by which he or she typically responds to and interacts with others. Attitudes, job efficiency, educational achievement, healthcare effectiveness, and, overall, the adaptability of humans to life situations are associated with their personality attributes. An individual’s performance is affected by many variables, above all their personality characteristics. Research on people’s personality characteristics shows that their behavior depends on their character and personality, so personality characteristics lay the ground for their behaviors. An organization’s social responsibility is beyond the framework of the minimum legal requirements of the organization. A major attribute of social responsibility is that all stakeholders should be considered. Stakeholder parties are defined as the groups of people somehow affecting or being affected by the organization and its activities. They include owners, board members, employees and unions, customers, commercial partners, suppliers, competitors, government, non-governmental organizations, and local communities. A human capital that plays a key role in converting the resources of a firm into income and creating wealth for stakeholders and can guarantee the viability and growth of organizations is potent and efficient management. The best performance and success of organizations can be expected only if they have potent and capable managers. The enhancement of society requires understanding people’s personalities considering the differences in personality and their impact on their performance. To understand personality, psychologists have studies its aspects and categorized people into different personality types. They argue that this categorization can be used in developing various economic, social, cultural, education, and other plans. To do their duties about all stakeholders, firms should incur costs. Managers incur these costs to create a proper mentality in stakeholders and believe that satisfying a community will motivate it to participate and will improve its performance.

The statistical population of the present research was composed of all managers of the firms listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange and the research period was a one-year period over 2019-2020. The sample size was determined by Cochran’s method to be 184. The firms included in the sample were selected by simple randomization.  The research is an applied ex-post-facto study that is a descriptive survey in terms of methodology. The emotionality of the managers was considered as the independent variable and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) as the dependent variable. Emotionality is one of the six characters in the HEXACO model. CSR has five dimensions including responsibilities towards society and country, environmental responsibility, workspace responsibility, market and industry responsibilities, operation, and intra-organizational processes. Data on the managers’ personality characteristics were collected by the HEXACO personality inventory (Ashton and Lee, 2009) The CSR checklist was prepared by the researcher and was used after it was confirmed by a panel of academic teachers and experts. Data on CSR were extracted from the firms’ annual reports.  These reports are published in the Codal portal concurrent with the publication of annual audited financial statements. They provide important information such as the introduction of board members, opportunities and threats, the general status of the firm by providing the main financial ratios of the firm, a description of ongoing activities, a description of the future programs, the industrial perspective in which the firm operates, the status of the firm in the industry inside and outside the country, the firm’s incomes and expenses, the most important income and expense information including the trend of the income and final price of the firm in recent years. The conceptual model of the research was tested by the analysis algorithm using the partial least squares in the Smart PLS 3 and SPSS 24 software packages.

The analyses were performed in two phases of analyzing the fit of the measurement model and the fit of the structural model. The fit of the measurement model was checked by three criteria of reliability, convergent validity, and divergent validity. The reliability of the measurement model was calculated by the coefficients of factor loads, Cronbach’s alpha, and composite reliability. The structural model was studied by analyzing the relations of the latent variables and the criteria of coefficients of significance, coefficients of determination, and Stone-Geisser criterion. The results of testing the research hypotheses showed that the emotionality of managers is related to all dimensions of CSR.

So, it is concluded that managers with the emotionality personality character pursue the benefits of all groups involved in the company and prioritize social responsibility towards all people, personnel, environment, and the market of the company’s commodities in corporate programs. Prioritizing stakeholders will increase mutual attention to the company and its products and this will ultimately increase the firm value and stakeholders’ wealth.