Achieving a great reputation for corporate social responsibility: study from the Czech hospitality industry

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be understood as an investment that will bring stability and prosperity to a company in the long-term. We investigate the notion that social initiatives will help companies to expand business through an excellent reputation in CSR and, thus, gain the conditions for profitable and sustainable growth. We employed questionnaire survey data and used statistical analysis of the results to identify possible links between social activities and other hotel characteristics, namely, a set code of ethics, hotel independence, hotel class, hotel size and managerial position of the respondent. According to the results, respondents considered socially responsible business practices as the most important. The Cause Promotion initiative was considered as less important than corporate philanthropy and volunteer work by hotel employees. The lowest importance was attributed to Cause-Related Marketing. A set ethical code has an impact on assessing the significance of all social initiatives. We have determined that managers of independent hotels pay less attention to social activities than managers of hotel chains. The hotel class did not affect responses in the categories of Cause Promotion and Social Marketing. Furthermore, hotel size did not affect assessed the significance of socially responsible business practices.