Do you feel you have a lot to be grateful for in life? Would you pay a little more to buy a product from a company that has good environmental practices?<\/p>\n
The questions may seem unrelated, but research by Karen Paul<\/strong>, professor, Department of Management and International Business in the College of Business Administration, brought them\u2014and many others\u2014together in the first studies undertaken to shed light on the relationship between positive psychology and the areas of business ethics and social responsibility.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the last decade, researchers have begun to look at psychology not in terms of pathologies, but rather, in light of certain positive attributes like happiness, success, and effective functioning,\u201d Paul said.<\/p>\n In the first of the two studies, she and two colleagues looked at hope and gratitude. In the second, they focused on spirituality and generativity (concern for future generations). Their aim: to see how these aspects of positive psychology might relate to a person\u2019s reaction to corporate policies.<\/p>\n \u201cWe found that all four qualities did predict people\u2019s attitudes to corporate social performance,\u201d Paul said. \u201cWe also discovered that people who scored high in both hope and gratitude had the strongest concerns about corporate social performance.\u201d<\/p>\n Study uses instrument devised by Paul.<\/em><\/p>\n Among the questionnaires, the researchers used an instrument that Paul developed with graduate students in the college. Called the \u201cConsumer Sensitivity to Corporate Social Responsibility Scale,\u201d she and others have employed the tool effectively in the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and The Netherlands.<\/p>\n The survey includes eleven items designed to measure a consumer\u2019s sensitivity to corporate actions related to pollution, corporate philanthropy, and disclosure of social information. Offering five options, from \u201cstrongly agree\u201d to \u201cstrongly disagree,\u201d it asks respondents to answer questions such as, \u201cI would be willing to pay a little more to buy a product from a company that has a good record in hiring and promoting women.\u201d<\/p>\n Findings from the studies\u2014and those that may come from follow-on studies\u2014offer a number of implications for businesses. The subject of corporate negligence has been center stage of late given the Enron scandal and other corporate debacles. However, just as positive psychology looks not at pathology but at positive characteristics, the opportunity to move companies toward greater corporate social responsibility has a positive orientation.<\/p>\n \u201cMarketing departments pay attention to what consumers want human resources professionals are concerned about employees\u2019 expectations, and top management heeds investors,\u201d Paul said. \u201cDepartments within corporations need to add corporate social responsibility to the factors they consider in their decision-making processes.\u201d<\/p>\n Corporate citizenship is good business.<\/em><\/p>\n There may even be a trend afoot: Forbes.com<\/em> published a special report, \u201cCorporate Citizenship,\u201d which examines how companies can lead in this arena and make it profitable.<\/p>\n Paul and her co-authors published the results of their two studies in an article titled \u201cA Preliminary Investigation into the Role of Positive Psychology in Consumer Sensitivity to Corporate Social Performance.\u201d It appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics<\/em>, the leading journal in the field of business and corporate ethics. Her interest in the research grew out of her work on socially responsible investing, chronicled in an article titled \u201c\u2018Bottom line\u2019 vs \u2018good corporate citizen\u2019: Business professor demonstrates that socially responsible investing pays off,\u201d in FIU Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you feel you have a lot to be grateful for in life? Would you pay a little more to buy a product from a company that has good environmental practices? The questions may seem unrelated, but research by Karen Paul, professor, Department of Management and International Business in the College of Business Administration, brought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[625,1451],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4193"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36269,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4193\/revisions\/36269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}