Temporal Orientation and Corporate Social Responsibility: Global Evidence

Abstract There has been a growing emphasis on the importance of a long‐term perspective in academia and practice. Yet understanding of the interdependency of those factors – the temporal preferences embedded in organizations and in societal values as well as the influence of temporal orientation of investors – remains limited. We theorize whether and how a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) is affected by the societal temporal orientation, its time horizon, and its investors' time horizon. Using a global sample, we confirm that CSR activity is higher when a country has a long‐term orientation culture, when the firm has a long‐time horizon, and when the controlling institutional investor has a long‐term investment horizon. We also find that the national culture's long‐term orientation heightens the effect of a firm's long‐time horizon on its CSR. Further, our results show that the effects of temporal orientation are more pronounced in environmental than in social CSR.