Being best in the world or best for the world? Fostering CSR cooperative behaviors through communication

Communication contributes to fostering environmentally friendly decisions in organizations. Yet, we know little about which message strategy influences a manager who is confronted with a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dilemma between prioritizing the environment or the bottom line. In order to understand this, we conducted a computer simulation with real participants, where we observed the extent to which persuasive vs rational messages vs absence of message influences individuals’ decisions to cooperate with competitors in order to maintain a clean natural resource in spite of privileging corporate gains. Results indicate that a persuasive message has the most significant effect on participants’ long-term cooperative behaviour and may positively influence the way individuals perceive altruistic cooperative behaviours. These findings contribute to studies on CSR and strategic communication, as they suggest that communication plays an important role in solving a CSR dilemma depending on the type of message strategy that is enacted. Also, they contribute to studies on performance indicators as they suggest which indicators to use to build a balanced scorecard that explicitly incorporates sustainability-related strategic objectives into the business.