Social responsibility in SMEs: a source of
business value
Cristina Iturrioz, Cristina Arago
´
n, Lorea Narbaiza and Asuncio
´
n Iban
˜
ez
Abstract
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the main elements that affect the social
responsibility (SR) business value generation in the small and medium firms (SMEs) context. In the
SMEs, basically three elements are related with the business value of a SR approach: the top
management SR orientation, the SR focus on the business critical issues and the SR alignment with the
business strategy.
Design/methodology/approach – In order to achieve this objective, different valid and reliable SR
measurement scales are developed and an ad hoc survey is answered by a sample of 245 SMEs out of a
population of 1,317 SMEs, a representative sample with a 5.76 per cent error.
Findings – This paper concludes that SR can be a source of value for the business and that the
business value generated by an SR approach is associated with certain conditions: the firm must
believe in SR behaviour further than a mere economic and legal perspective; the SR activities must be
focused on the critical issues that heavily conditions business competitiveness and, finally, the SR must
be embedded in the firm’s business strategy.
Originality/value – The empirical evidence obtained would not only support theoretical development
about SR and SMEs, but it is also relevant to practice. The study of how SR must be developed in order
to generate value for the firm helps SMEs to engage more effectively in SR and generates incentives for
the stable, coherent and long-term development of this kind of activity.
Keywords Corporate social responsibility; Small to medium-sized enterprises; Competitive strategy,
Strategic alignment
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Lots of empirical studies have analysed the relation between social responsibility (SR)
activities and business performance in different contexts and following different
methodologies, but there is not a consistent conclusion about this issue (Griffin and
Mahon, 1997; Roman et al., 1999; Margolis and Walsh, 2001 and Orlitzky et al., 2003) and,
beyond that, the factors underlying the business value generation of the SR activities are still
unexplored.
Unlike the larger companies, small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) are subjected to much
less pressure both from institutions and interest groups (Dex and Scheibl, 2001) to
undertake the management of SR, basically because individual SME impact is low. Also, the
European Commission (EC, 2002) establishes that SMEs do not obtain the same benefits as
large firms from their social commitments. Given the growing emphasis on the integration of
SR practices in SMEs, the purpose of this empirical study is to explore the business value
creation of the SR activities in the context of the SMEs.
According to the European Commission (EC, 2002), SMEs tend to be largely unfamiliar with
the SR concept, managing their social impact by following their own intuition and applying
socially responsible practices informally. It has been demonstrated that the actions of SMEs
DOI 10.1108/17471110910977320 VOL. 5 NO. 3 2009, pp. 423-434, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1747-1117
j
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY JOURNAL
j
PAGE 423
Cristina Iturrioz is Vice Dean
Cristina Arago
´
n is Director
of the Department of
Organization and Business
Policy, Lorea Narbaiza is
Teacher and Asuncio
´
n
Iban
˜
ez is Teacher, all at
ESTE – School of
Management, University of
Deusto, San Sebastia
´
n,
Spain.