Stakeholder‐Centric Governance and Corporate Social Performance: A Cross‐National Study

Abstract

Abstract Because prior research has largely adopted an agency theory perspective and focused extensive effort on examining shareholder‐centric corporate governance mechanisms and their outcomes for shareholders or select groups of stakeholders, relatively little work has focused on whether governance structures can maximize outcomes for all stakeholders. We adopt an integrated, stakeholder‐agency theory perspective to explore a set of corporate governance mechanisms that potentially can help firms generate greater engagement with a broad array of stakeholders. We test the relationship between stakeholder‐centric governance and corporate social performance using a sample of 342 firms in 24 countries over four years and find that certain corporate governance mechanisms can indeed be construed as ‘stakeholder‐centric’ as they positively impact corporate social performance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment