The Volunteer corporate practice as corporate social responsibility to employees and the community

Abstract

There is some consensus that the Corporate Volunteer (CV) has evolved from a philanthropic activity practice towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This consensus is based primarily on the fact that, generally, companies frame their activities and volunteer programs in the framework of their social actions, managed from their areas of CSR and inform on them in their social or sustainability reports. Since CSR is a business philosophy based on the management of impacts on stakeholders, all conceptualization of CV as a tool for CSR implementation requires associating their application with stakeholders on which seeks to generate positive impacts through it. The review of the literature on VC shows that this activity is associated almost exclusively with two stakeholders: the employees and the community. This article presents the preliminary results of a quantitative study that correlates the application of CV activities with the incorporation of CSR practices towards these stakeholders. To measure this incorporation a questionnaire designed based on the orientations of the ISO 26000 Social Responsibility guide was used. The questionnaire was applied to a group of 96 companies, performing one comparative analysis between companies that practice corporate volunteering and those who do not practice. The results obtained support the hypothesis that the application of corporate volunteering is positively associated with the incorporation of CSR policies towards both stakeholders.