The Transfer of Corporate Social (Ir)Responsibility Profile through Executive Migration

Decreasing heterogeneity in firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) profiles has been primarily attributed to external factors, while internal factors are thought to increase heterogeneity. By integrating the stakeholder and upper echelon theories, we propose that executive migration can be an internal factor that decreases heterogeneity. An empirical analysis, using 119 executive migrations over a 14-year period, suggests that a newly migrated executive’s origin firm’s CSR profile as well as CSiR profile is transferred to the focal firm, narrowing the distance between the two firms’ CS(i)R profiles. The positive relationship between the executive’s migration and the transfer of CSiR profile is found to be stronger when a migrating executive’s managerial ability is higher.