Contrasting Attitudes of Top and Middle Level Executives Towards Corporate Social Responsibility Issues.

Preliminary discussions with a group of executives from large New York corporations were conducted concerning current corporate responsibility policies and programs. From this phase, it was clear that implementation problems abound, even within those corporations where top management is enthusiastically supporting newly-announced corporate social responsibility programs. In particular, many of the of the common implementation problems appeared to stem from attitude differences of top management versus middle management concerning the importance or urgency of specific corporate social responsibility policies, the methods of direction or control of the resulting programs, and the impact of such programs on short term operating results. In an effort to test directly the significance of such differing attitudes, a field survey has been designed. A structured questionnaire will be completed by top executives (about 10) and an equal number of middle managers in each of 50 corporations. Procedural safeguards have been established to assure confidentiality for respondents. Moreover, careful controls have been devised so that the selection of middle managers will not be influenced by top management in an effort to make their corporation look good. Two pretests of the structured questionnaire have been completed, one on M.B.A. students and one on the executives of two top New York corporations. The questionnaire consists mainly of Likert-type and ranking questions. Analysis will involve classification tables, tests of mean differences, rank-order correlations, and factor analysis to identify attitude clusters. In addition, classification questions concerning organizational structures and budgeting procedures will allow consideration of how such features relate to differences in attitude conflict levels. The results should be helpful in pointing up attitudinal conflicts which corporations must avoid or remedy if corporate social responsibility programs are to be implemented efficiently.