Is managerial entrenchment always bad and corporate social responsibility always good? A cross-national examination of their combined influence on shareholder value

Research summary: Building on the comparative capitalism's notion of institutional complementarities, we examine whether firms’ simultaneous adoption of managerial entrenchment provisions (MEPs) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reinforces or undercuts one another in influencing firm financial performance. We propose that the financial impact of such configurations is contingent on the country's institutional setting. In Liberal Market Economies (LMEs), where firms face strong pressures to achieve short-term goals, the combination of MEPs and CSR creates shareholder value, particularly when firms engage in internally oriented CSR projects. Conversely, in Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs), where institutions already curb short-term demands, the combined adoption of MEPs and CSR initiatives destroys shareholder value, particularly when this CSR is external. Overall, our study enhances understanding of the institutional complementarity between corporate governance and CSR. Managerial summary: This study examines how two organizational practices, managerial entrenchment provisions (MEPs), and corporate social responsibility (CSR), combine between them to improve or reduce firms’ financial success. Our analysis demonstrates that institutional framework has a strong influence on their combined effect. When the institutional context supports solutions to coordination problems among economic agents through market-based arrangements, MEPs allow the implementation of strategies directed to promote long-term investments and relationships. In this case, MEPs when paired with CSR allow generating intangibles that contribute to create shareholder value. Contrarily, in frameworks with coordination mechanisms based on nonmarket arrangements, the joint adoption of MEPs and CSR destroys value by increasing the power of managers and blockholders to extract rents at the expense of firms’ minority shareholders.