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Abstract
Efforts to promote corporate societal and environmental accountability (SEA) should be informed by an understanding of stakeholders’ attitudes toward enhanced accountability standards. However, little is known regarding current attitudes on this subject or the determinants of these attitudes. To address this issue, this study examines the relationship between personal values and support for social and environmental accountability for a sample of Indian MBA students. Selected contemporary social and environmental issues were used to assess the students’ support for social and environmental accountability. Principal component analysis was used to explore the underlying dimensions or factors that shape social and environmental beliefs and attitudes. Multiple regression models were run for each of the SEA dimensions to test the hypotheses and the relationship between the values and support for SEA. Exploratory factor analysis of the items revealed two distinct factors: (1) endorsement of the general proposition that corporations and executives should be held accountable for the social and environmental impacts of their actions and (2) agreement that the government should adopt and enforce formal SEA standards. The results indicate that the security and universalism value type is positively associated with general support for SEA but not with support for government enforcement of accountability standards. The study found that the benevolence value type is negatively associated with general support for SEA. Gender also has a significant impact on support for government enforcement of SEA standards.
Notes
1. India is one of the largest (6%) CO2-emitting countries in the world, according to the report of European Commission and Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in 2012, http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/CO2REPORT2012.pdf.
2. Indian economy has grown by 8.5% in 09. The World Bank has reported 10.5% growth rate in 2010, 6.3% in 2011 and 3.2% in 2013. (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZGwww.ibef.org).
3. Indian economy has grown by 8.5% in 09. The World Bank has reported 10.5% growth rate in 2010, 6.3% in 2011 and 3.2% in 2013. (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZGwww.ibef.org).
4. Self-transcendence value comprises Universalism and Benevolence. The Universalist seeks social justice and tolerance for all. They promote peace and equality and those who tend towards benevolence are very giving, seeking to help others and provide general welfare.
5. Biospheric values focus on the welfare of the environment and biosphere as opposed to focus on self or welfare of other people.
6. Which included items from the Schwartz (Citation1994) self-transcendence group.
7. New Environmental Paradigm is a measurement scale that was designed to assess pro-environmental orientation. It is a revision of Dunlap and Van Liere’s (Citation1978) original NEP.
8. Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most significant species on the planet, or the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective.
9. All the items are double-barrelled because each includes two sentences. Schwartz (Citation2003) discusses the rationale for this and presents evidence suggesting that it does not create a problem in this case.
10. The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesised relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. In the early stages of economic growth, degradation and pollution increase, but beyond some level of income per capita (which will vary for different indicators), the trend reverses, so that at high-income levels, economic growth leads to environmental improvement http://isecoeco.org/pdf/stern.pdf.