Corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability: achieving firms sustainable performance supported by plant capability

In the contemporary industrial setting, corporations face direct and indirect pressures from multiple intrinsic and extrinsic environmental constituents, including competitive entities and resource limitations, hindering their continuity and sustainability. Against this backdrop, Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an industrial dynamic that enables firms to address the pressures imposed by these environmental constituents. Therefore, this study examines the impact of CSR on firm’s sustainable performance conditioned at different plant sizes. In doing so, the data was collected using a survey instrument comprising close-ended items with five-point likert scales on each item for measuring managerial perceptions from manufacturing industries. Through non-probabilistic sampling, a sample of 399 responses from middle to top-level management was collected. Smart PLS was utilized to analyze the data for validating the hypothesized relationships between the latent constructs. To enhance the reliability of the tests used for the analysis, bootstrapping was used to iterate the sample size and refine significance levels. Overall findings indicate that environmental sustainable development is essential to explain the relationship between ‘CSR for consumer’ and ‘Firm sustainable performance’. The relationship between ‘CSR to employees’ and ‘Firm sustainable performance’ is significant both with and without the explanatory role of sustainable environmental performance. The link between CSR to community and firm sustainable performance is not being explained by environmental sustainable development. These results offer valuable policy recommendations.