Corporate Social Responsibility in Automotive: The Impact of CSR Activities on the Loyalty of Internal Stakeholders of ŠKODA AUTO, a.s., towards the Employer.

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Abstract:

At the beginning of 2020, none of us could have imagined the extent of the changes and limitations that would affect us all in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In the Czech Republic, during the first spring lockdown, not only all educational or cultural facilities were closed and business enterprises significantly regulated, but also the largest manufacturers were stopped for a few weeks. Many companies have responded to the situation with social and personal responsibility and have begun to create new programs and activities not only to help their employees but also local communities.
ŠKODA AUTO, a.s. noted a six-week outage. Nevertheless, they started many projects that can be defined as part of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. CSR refers to the management of a company and the building of relationships with partners, which contributes to improving the reputation and increasing the credibility of the company. It is a voluntary commitment to behave responsibly towards the environment and the society in which they do business. Typically, these are three key areas - economic (eg transparency, rejection of corruption, etc.), social (strict respect for human rights) and environmental (eg environmentally friendly production or environmental policy). ŠKODA AUTO, a.s. has included all three key pillars of sustainability, also known as the triple bottom line, in its assistance. According to stakeholder theory, a business entity should serve as a tool for coordinating the interests of stakeholders, instead of maximizing the profit of shareholders. However, the greatest emphasis was placed on the social level.
The classic marketing problem is usually the mismatch between internal and external perceptions of the importance and impact of CSR activities. Very often, these programs are seen as a marketing move. In particular, the impact on employees and their attitude and loyalty towards the employer are ambiguous. For this reason, in May 2020, a quantitative marketing research was carried out among the internal employees of ŠKODA AUTO, a.s. in order to find out whether they believe in CSR activities of the company, whether they perceive their benefit for the local community and whether this strengthens good relationship with their employer.
The main goal of this paper is to present a system of perception of CSR activities from the perspective of internal stakeholders in ŠKODA AUTO, a.s,. Three key research questions have been identified to meet the main goal:
Can the perception of the benefits of CSR activities in the company be considered as a system?
Which socio-demographic groups of internal stakeholders are most influenced by CSR in their relationship with the employer?
Can employee loyalty and a positive attitude towards the employer be strengthened by CSR activities?
In order to solve the problem was used a system approach. The data from the questionnaire survey were therefore evaluated statistically. First, Pearson's chi-square test of good agreement was performed using contingency tables, with the relationships being basically evaluated according to a p-value level of less than 0.05. However, the chi-square test says nothing more about the nature of the relationship between the variables. Therefore, correlation was used. To clarify the nature of the relationship, Spearman's correlation coefficient rhó was chosen, used mainly for ordinal variables, for the values of which we can determine the order, but it is not possible to clearly define the unit of the variable. In this case, not only the tightness of the relationships was examined, but also their direction, given by whether the correlation coefficient is positive or negative. Only essential and significant relationships between variables were chosen to be used in the model.
Socio-demographic variables that do not form but affect the identified relationships were also analysed in contingency tables and chi-square test, however, it was not possible to use correlations to determine the direction and tightness of the relationship. To be meaningful, it is necessary to know whether the relationship is conclusive with respect to individual subcategories of the observed independent quantity. For this reason, the so-called adjusted residues were used in the contingency tables.
The relationships of statistically significant variables were subsequently integrated in a causal loop diagram, which simply illustrates the system of perception of CSR in the company by the internal stakeholders and at the same time captures the socio-demographic variables that affect this perception of socially responsible activities and loyalty towards the employer. The result is therefore a model that captures the impacts of CSR activities on ŠKODA AUTO employees, their attitude towards the company and the development of their loyalty to the employer. It is a very clear management tool, designed not only for the management of CSR activities in ŠKODA AUTO, but also as a general system of CSR activities, which provides purposeful simplification, representation and explanation of possible relationships and ties that can be effectively used in managerial and marketing planning.