Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation Effects on MBA Job Choice

Abstract

In a preliminary study with 279 MBA's from two European and three North American business schools we find that reputation-related attributes of caring about employees, environmental sustainability, community/stakeholder relations, and ethical products and services are important in job choice decisions. We use an adaptive conjoint analysis survey tool to discover the relative weighting of a new set of social responsibility job search criteria, including these attributes with traditional job search criteria like financial package, geographical location, etc. In addition, our results show that more than ninety percent of the MBAs in the sample were willing to forgo financial benefits in order to work for an organization with a better reputation for corporate social responsibility and ethics.