Corporate social responsibility as a source of competitive advantage in large enterprises

Abstract

The competitive advantage of enterprises in the conditions of market economy is not generated merely by ensuring high quality products and services. Therefore, in their strategies, they need to involve elements such as corporate social responsibility. The aim of the paper is to identify the key sources of competitive advantage of large enterprises. In the empirical research, the hypothesis has been tested to determine if the application of corporate social responsibility by enterprises has a statistically significant effect on gaining competitive advantage in the market. The hypothesis is verified on the basis of the authors' study of 253 large enterprises operating in Poland by means of exploratory factor analysis, the statistical method of reducing the number of classifying empirical variables, i.e. of discovering a structure in their interrelations. The procedure enabled the selection of the factors with the greatest statistical shares in explaining variability. To this end, the input space was rotated in accordance with the Varimax criterion, with the number of determined factors specified by means of the Kaiser criterion and Cattell's scree test. The application of an exploratory factor analysis enabled the authors to construct an original factor model of sources of enterprise competitive advantage, with three factors identified: marketing, innovation activity and corporate social responsibility. This indicates that marketing activities, innovation activities and the application of corporate social responsibility are the key sources of competitive advantage in large enterprises operating in the market.