How Does the Tenure of CEOs Affect the Performance of CSR? Empirical Evidence and Analysis

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) tenure and firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance as well as moderating effect of CEOs’ gender diversity on this relationship. Design/Methodology: By incorporating a sample of 1036 firm-year observations of Bangladeshi non-financial firms for the period 2005-2015, content analysis has been implemented to generate a CSR performance index. The ordinary least squares (OLS) regression method is applied to estimate all regression models. The findings of this study are likely to be affected by both unobservable and observable selection bias. Therefore, to minimize the omitted variable bias, we implement several robustness analyses such as greater CSR performance. Findings: The study outcomes denote that CEOs tenure is negatively associated with the firms’ CSR performance, supporting both the career apprehension and career prospect hypotheses. Further analysis also displays that the inverse relationship is more noticeable for firms having a greater CEOs gender diversity. Additional analysis also reports that the negative association is more pronounced for firms with greater CSR performance. Originality: The study has a significant contribution to the literature on CSR performance by documenting that CEOs tenure has a negative effect on CSR performance coupled with a moderating effect of CEOs gender diversity on this association