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Board Diversity and Corporate Social Responsibility: Empirical Evidence from France

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Abstract

This study analyzes how the board’s characteristics could be associated with globally corporate social responsibility CSR and specific areas of CSR. It is drawn on all listed firms, in 2016, on the SBF120 between 2003 and 2016. Our results provide strong evidence that diversity in boards and diversity of boards globally are positively associated with corporate social performance. However, they influence differently specific dimensions of CSR performance. First, we show that large boards are positively associated with all areas of CSR performance, while specific and overall CSR scores are negatively associated with CEO-chair structures. Second, board gender diversity is positively associated with human rights and corporate governance dimensions. Third, age diversity is positively associated with corporate governance, human resources, human rights, and environmental activities. Also, our results provide evidence that outside directors care about CSR performance. Specifically, the presence of foreign directors is positively associated with environmental performance and community involvement, whereas CSR-Governance dimension is positively associated with the presence of independent directors. Regarding the director’s educational level, post-graduated directors are positively and significantly associated with overall CSR score and all CSR sub-scores, except the corporate governance one. When directors have multiple directorships, they are more concerned about human resources, environmental performance, and business ethics. Finally, our findings are robust only in non-family firms. In fact, family boards are less diverse than non-family ones; specifically, they have a lower number of independent, foreign, and high-educated directors.

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Notes

  1. VigeoEiris is a global provider of environmental, social and governance (ESG) research to investors and public and private corporates in 41 sectors on 38 ESG. Scores vary from 0 to 100. CSR score is used to assign a relative performance rating from—- to +  + on a scale of 5 levels of scoring.

  2. More statistics are available upon request.

  3. The second stage is to achieve at least 40% of board members, in 2017.

  4. In previous studies, authors focus on either all French listed firms appearing in the World scope database (Boubaker and Labégorre 2008), or small and medium-sized corporations (Faccio and Lang 2002), or non-financial listed firms (Nekhili et al. 2016). However, in the current study, we calculate the percentage of family-controlled firms among financial and non-financial firms listed on the SBF 120 index of 2016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Montpellier Research in Management Laboratory, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France

    Rania Beji & Ouidad Yousfi

  2. Gouvernance d’Entreprise, Finance Appliquée Et Audit Laboratory, Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Tunis, Université de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia

    Rania Beji, Nadia Loukil & Abdelwahed Omri

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Table 13 List CSR criteria in VigeoEiris database
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13.

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Beji, R., Yousfi, O., Loukil, N. et al. Board Diversity and Corporate Social Responsibility: Empirical Evidence from France. J Bus Ethics 173, 133–155 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04522-4

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