A STRUCTURAL MODEL PROPOSAL FOR INTERNAL CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

The understudied internal side of Corporate Social Responsibility has the emphasis on employees as strategically important to pursuit responsible actions. This paper considers responsible human capital business practices as key factors explaining competitive success across firms. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Internal Corporate Social Responsibility is a good management framework for business competitiveness. Supported by the scarce academic literature in the field, the article starts by the definition of selected indicators to build constructs and to develop a structural model able to explain several relationships of causality between the internal side of Corporate Social Responsibility, business innovation, performance and competitive success with structural equation modeling as selected methodology. The conclusion after the statistical analysis procedure applied to a sample of 590 firms in the Mediterranean region of Extremadura in Spain is significantly positive, confirming three of the four hypotheses developed in the conceptual model. To finish, some suggestions for the future research agenda emerge from this first attempt to approach the internal side of responsibility to competitiveness in business management.