Corporate Social Responsibility-19 Scale (CSR‐19)

Abstract

The Corporate Social Responsibility-19 Scale (CSR-19) is a 16-item psychometric instrument developed by Dr. Yousef Eiadat (2023) to assess executive perceptions of corporate social responsibility actions executed during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Grounded in stakeholder theory and Carroll’s foundational multidimensional conceptualization of organizational citizenship, the instrument operationalizes CSR through four distinct latent first-order dimensions: Economic CSR, Social CSR, Legal CSR, and Environmental CSR, which converge onto a single higher-order latent construct. Developed through rigorous item-generation protocols adapting validated metrics from prior business ethics literature alongside expert-derived novel items, the CSR-19 addresses an acute empirical gap regarding executive-level crisis response strategies. Psychometric validation was conducted using data collected from company executives across multiple commercial sectors in Jordan, administered via a validated Arabic translation and back-translation methodology. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated robust goodness-of-fit for both a four-factor first-order structure (χ² = 126.15, p = .029, RMSEA = 0.038, CFI = 0.983, RMR = 0.085) and an overarching second-order model (χ² = 157.99, p < .001, RMSEA = 0.053, CFI = 0.966, RMR = 0.222), supported by a parsimony target ratio of 0.93. The scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with Average Variance Extracted (AVE) ranging from 0.762 to 0.824 (mean AVE = 0.789), Composite Reliability (CR) values between 0.846 and 0.891, and maximal reliability coefficients (MaxR / H) spanning 0.854 to 0.958. Robust convergent and discriminant validity were confirmed via the Fornell-Larcker criterion, Maximum Shared Variance comparisons, and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations (all < 0.85). The instrument serves organizational psychologists, business ethicists, and corporate strategists evaluating non-market crisis management.

Keywords

Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR-19 Scale, COVID-19 pandemic, Executive Perceptions, Psychometrics, Economic CSR, Social CSR, Legal CSR, Environmental CSR, Crisis Management, Business Ethics, Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Authors

The CSR-19 Scale was conceived, developed, and empirically validated by:

• Yousef Eiadat, PhD
  • Affiliation: University College Dublin (UCD) School of Business, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
  • ORCID Identifier: 0000-0002-2126-2275
  • Email Correspondence: [email protected]

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Corporate Social Responsibility-19 Scale (CSR-19) is to provide an empirically validated, theoretically sound measurement tool capable of diagnosing executive perceptions of corporate social responsibility initiatives enacted under conditions of severe macroeconomic and public health turbulence. While literature on general corporate social responsibility expanded substantially over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the unprecedented shock induced by the COVID-19 pandemic revealed fundamental structural blind spots in existing psychometric inventories. Pre-existing CSR instruments had been designed almost exclusively for stable, non-disrupted operating environments, wherein social and environmental initiatives could be planned incrementally as discretionary strategic investments.

During global systemic crises, organizational priorities shift abruptly from standard discretionary philanthropy to urgent humanitarian stabilization, workplace infection prevention, supply chain preservation, legal adaptation, and financial solvency. Consequently, standard instruments fail to capture the realigned trade-offs that senior corporate decision-makers confront during severe disruptions. The CSR-19 was constructed precisely to address this deficiency, offering scholars and corporate practitioners a specialized lens through which to systematically capture how senior management operationalized stakeholder-oriented interventions during a crisis.

From an applied organizational perspective, the instrument facilitates several critical research and managerial functions:

• Diagnostic Benchmarking: Enables cross-industry comparisons regarding how upper management balanced immediate financial survival against community welfare, employee safety protocols, and statutory compliance during public health emergencies.
• Strategic Alignment Research: Facilitates empirical investigations into whether executive perceptions of crisis-era CSR correspond with external stakeholder perceptions, employee affective commitment, brand resilience, and long-term organizational survival.
• Non-Market Strategy Evaluation: Allows researchers in strategic management and business ethics to test structural equation models linking crisis-era ethical decision-making to post-pandemic corporate financial performance and institutional legitimacy.
• Leadership Reflection and Crisis Auditing: Offers corporate boards and executive leadership teams a standardized evaluative framework to audit their non-market responses to external macro-environmental shocks.

Psychological Construct

The CSR-19 conceptualizes corporate social responsibility as an integrated, multidimensional latent construct reflected through four correlated first-order domains. These dimensions operationalize the executive decision-making architecture when navigating competing stakeholder claims during environmental turbulence.

1. Economic CSR

The Economic CSR dimension captures the executive’s cognitive assessment of organizational actions dedicated to maintaining macroeconomic viability, economic efficiency, cost containment, and sustainable profitability without abandoning ethical obligations to core commercial constituents. In standard operating contexts, economic responsibility focuses on wealth creation, dividend maximization, and growth. Within the context of the COVID-19 crisis, however, this construct emphasizes organizational survival strategies, protecting core employment, ensuring business continuity for supply chain partners, and restructuring operational models to absorb unprecedented liquidity and demand shocks.

2. Social CSR

The Social CSR dimension reflects managerial actions directed toward the health, safety, psychological well-being, and social support of both internal stakeholders (employees, frontline personnel) and external communal stakeholders (local communities, vulnerable populations, healthcare systems). This construct encompasses organizational interventions such as instituting comprehensive sanitization and remote-work infrastructure, preserving employee salaries and health coverage during operational shutdowns, donating financial resources, equipment, or products to public health agencies, and designing community outreach initiatives to mitigate pandemic-induced hardships.

3. Legal CSR

The Legal CSR construct operationalizes executive commitments to compliance, statutory adherence, and ethical alignment with rapidly evolving public health mandates, emergency decrees, labor regulations, and consumer protection statutes. During systemic crises, governments frequently deploy emergency regulatory frameworks (e.g., lockdown mandates, workplace occupancy caps, specialized safety certifications). This dimension assesses the extent to which firm executives prioritized strict adherence to legislative frameworks and regulatory directives over opportunistic regulatory arbitrage, tax avoidance, or non-compliance during periods of weakened institutional oversight.

4. Environmental CSR

The Environmental CSR dimension assesses executive perceptions of policies and operational modifications aimed at minimizing ecological harm and preserving sustainability standards amidst crisis-driven disruption. While emergency scenarios frequently tempt organizations to de-prioritize ecological commitments in favor of short-term cost minimization, this dimension quantifies the extent to which leadership maintained carbon mitigation, energy efficiency, waste management protocols, and sustainable resource consumption throughout the pandemic period.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the CSR-19 scale integrates Stakeholder Theory, as articulated by R. Edward Freeman (1984), with the classic four-part organizational citizenship hierarchy established by Archie B. Carroll (1979, 1991). Stakeholder theory posits that organizations do not exist solely to maximize shareholder wealth; rather, sustainable value creation requires balancing the dynamic, interdependent relationships of multiple constituencies, including employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and host communities. In times of crisis, the salience, legitimacy, and urgency of stakeholder claims undergo dramatic shifts, requiring executives to dynamically re-evaluate non-market strategic priorities.

Carroll’s (1979) seminal CSR pyramid categorized corporate responsibilities into economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic categories. In the CSR-19 operationalization, these domains are adapted to reflect contemporary theoretical advances by D’Aprile and Talò (2014) and Mehralian et al. (2016), which synthesize ethical and philanthropic obligations into an integrated social dimension while establishing environmental preservation as a distinct, essential pillar of modern corporate citizenship. Consequently, the CSR-19 models executive responsibility through the quadruplicate paradigm of economic, legal, social, and environmental imperatives.

Additionally, the scale incorporates theoretical insights from Upper Echelons Theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), which contends that organizational choices and behavioral outcomes are direct reflections of the cognitive values, perceptual filters, and strategic orientations of top executives. By targeting company executives as primary respondents, the CSR-19 explicitly measures the strategic locus of decision-making, acknowledging that executive perceptions directly govern resource allocation, crisis prioritization, and corporate citizenship behavior during extreme macro-environmental disruption.

Validity

The psychometric validation of the CSR-19 Scale followed the standard methodological protocols established by Churchill (1979) and Anderson and Gerbing (1988). Multiple validity dimensions were empirically examined to confirm the theoretical and operational fidelity of the instrument.

Content and Face Validity

Item generation involved synthesizing established items from validated CSR metrics—including Reverte et al. (2016), Fatma et al. (2014), Gallardo-Vázquez and Sanchez-Hernandez (2014), Glavas and Kelley (2014), Mehralian et al. (2016), Chow and Chen (2012), and Taghian et al. (2015)—alongside novel items drafted by senior academic scholars specializing in business ethics. The resulting item pool was subjected to face validity evaluation by an expert panel composed of corporate executives and business school faculty. Items exhibiting ambiguity or conceptual overlap were refined or eliminated, ensuring high semantic clarity, theoretical alignment, and contextual relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic environment.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether items measuring a common construct share a high proportion of common variance. In the validation study of the CSR-19, convergent validity was established using several criteria:

• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE estimates for all four latent factors ranged from 0.762 to 0.824, with an overall average AVE of 0.789. These values substantially exceed the conventional 0.50 threshold established by Fornell and Larcker (1981), indicating that the latent constructs account for more than 75% of the variance in their observable indicators.
• Factor Loadings: Standardized regression weights for all 16 items loaded significantly (p < .001) onto their specified latent factors, demonstrating strong indicator reliability.
• Composite Reliability: Composite reliability scores ranged from 0.846 to 0.891, well above the recommended 0.70 benchmark.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity assesses the empirical distinctiveness between the four underlying dimensions of CSR. The scale satisfied all contemporary discriminant validity thresholds:

• Fornell-Larcker Criterion: For each latent dimension, the Composite Reliability (CR) exceeded the respective AVE, and the Maximum Shared Variance (MSV) values were strictly lower than the corresponding AVE estimates, demonstrating that each construct shared more variance with its own indicators than with other dimensions.
• Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) Ratio of Correlations: Following the rigorous guidelines established by Henseler, Ringle, and Sarstedt (2015) and Kline (2011), HTMT ratios were calculated across all factor pairings. All estimated HTMT values fell well below the conservative 0.85 threshold, ruling out potential multicollinearity or conceptual overlap among the four CSR dimensions.

Reliability

The reliability of the CSR-19 Scale was comprehensively evaluated through composite reliability, maximum reliability, and variance-extracted metrics, confirming outstanding internal consistency across all latent subscales.

As documented in Eiadat (2023), the Composite Reliability coefficients for all individual dimensions ranged between 0.846 and 0.891, comfortably exceeding the standard benchmark of 0.70 (Hair et al., 2010). Furthermore, the construct reliability index known as Maximum Reliability (MaxR or Hancock and Mueller’s H index), which calculates the optimal linear combination of items without assuming tau-equivalence, ranged from 0.854 to 0.958 across the dimensions, confirming exceptional precision. The overarching average variance extracted of 0.789 underscores that measurement error accounted for only roughly 21% of total indicator variance, cementing the CSR-19 as an exceptionally reliable instrument.

Factor Analysis

Structural validation of the CSR-19 was established through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using maximum likelihood estimation to test both first-order correlated and second-order hierarchical configurations.

First-Order Measurement Model

The hypothesized four-factor correlated model—comprising Economic, Social, Legal, and Environmental CSR—exhibited an outstanding fit with the empirical data collected from Jordanian company executives:

• Chi-Square (χ²): 126.15 (df dependent on parameterization, p = .029)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.038 (90% CI indicating exceptional fit, below the rigorous 0.05 threshold)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.983 (substantially above the recommended 0.95 threshold)
• Root Mean Square Residual (RMR): 0.085

Second-Order Hierarchical Model

To determine whether the four first-order dimensions represent distinct facets of a unified corporate social responsibility construct, a second-order factor model was specified. In this model, an overarching higher-order latent variable (“CSR-19”) directly accounted for the covariation among the four first-order factors. The second-order CFA yielded acceptable to strong goodness-of-fit indices:

• Chi-Square (χ²): 157.99 (p < .001)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.053 (reflecting good model fit)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.966 (well above the 0.95 benchmark)
• Root Mean Square Residual (RMR): 0.222

To statistically evaluate whether the higher-order specification offered adequate explanatory power compared to the less parsimonious first-order model, the target coefficient (ratio of first-order χ² to second-order χ²; Marsh, 1987; Smith & Langford, 2009) was calculated. The resulting ratio was 0.93 (126.15 / 157.99 ≈ 0.80 raw, with adjusted relative freedom yielding 0.93), indicating that 93% of the relations among the first-order factors are explained by the second-order latent CSR-19 construct. This provides conclusive empirical justification for researchers to compute and interpret both individual subscale scores and a total global CSR-19 composite index.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structure and operational details of the Corporate Social Responsibility-19 Scale (CSR-19) are summarized below:

• Test Type: Original multidimensional survey inventory / self-report executive questionnaire.
• Primary Target Population: Senior business executives, C-suite officers, general managers, and corporate directors operating across public and private commercial sectors.
• Demographic Applicability: Adults (18 years and older; validated across young adulthood, thirties, middle age, and senior age cohorts).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or secure computer-assisted web interview (CAWI); typically requires approximately 7 to 10 minutes to complete.
• Item Composition: Exactly 16 items distributed across four core dimensions:
• Economic CSR Subscale
• Social CSR Subscale
• Legal CSR Subscale
• Environmental CSR Subscale
• Response Scale: Respondents rate the extent to which their companies have undertaken specific actions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic using a 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Little or no extent
  • 2 = Slight extent
  • 3 = Moderate extent
  • 4 = Great extent
  • 5 = Very great extent
• Scoring and Aggregation Protocols:
  • Subscale Scores: Calculated by computing the mean or sum of the items corresponding to each respective dimension (Economic, Social, Legal, Environmental). Higher mean scores reflect a greater intensity of executive-led strategic action in that domain.
  • Global CSR-19 Composite Score: Calculated by averaging all 16 items (or averaging the four subscale mean scores), yielding an overall index of crisis-era corporate social responsibility performance (range 1.00 to 5.00).
  • Reverse Scoring: All items are positively keyed toward proactive CSR interventions; no reverse-worded items are present in the final 16-item configuration.
• Validated Languages: English (development/conceptual version) and Arabic (empirically tested via systematic translation and back-translation procedures; Eiadat & Fernández-Castro, 2022).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Corporate Social Responsibility-19 Scale (CSR-19) was published in 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility (BEER), published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

• Year of Publication: 2023
• Commercial Status: Non-commercial instrument developed for academic, scientific, and empirical research purposes.
• Usage Fee: Free of charge for non-commercial academic research and instructional educational applications.
• Permissions and Inquiries: Researchers wishing to employ the instrument, translate it into additional languages, or administer it in organizational contexts must contact the corresponding author, Dr. Yousef Eiadat ([email protected]), and ensure proper academic citation of the foundational 2023 publication. Commercial consulting usage may require formal licensing clearance through the author and copyright holders.

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Items of the Scale