Driving sustainable growth through humanistic social responsibility in small and medium enterprises of developing countries

Author: 
Dr. Kudakwashe Zvitambo and Dr. Bobo Chazireni

Social Responsibility has been associated with large corporations. Scarcity of literature on humanistic social responsibility of Small and Medium indicates that few researchers tend to carry out such study. They have the perception that Small and Medium enterprises regard social responsibility as a costly initiative. This scenario undermines the importance and critical role that Small and Medium Enterprises play in society. The study aims at exploring factors driving sustainable growth through humanistic social responsibility in Small and Medium Enterprises of developing countries. The study intended to assess attitude of Small and Medium Enterprises towards humanistic social responsibility; investigate the humanistic social responsibilities practices exhibited by Small and Medium Enterprises; exploring barriers undermining the humanistic social responsibility practices and examine small and medium enterprises owner-managers’ values key to sustainable growth of their businesses. The Stakeholder Theoretical framework guided the study. A mixed method approach was adopted where data was obtained by means of self-administered questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that respondents had negative perception towards humanistic social responsibility. Stakeholders were not treated equally as required by the Stakeholder Theory and humanistic social responsibility took as position of extra-curricular from their core-business. The study recommends that local authorities must play a leading role in supporting Small and Medium Enterprises to promote humanistic social responsibility. The small and medium enterprises should come up with their own governance code which promotes humanistic social responsibility. Small and medium enterprises should play a role of responsible business citizens.

Paper No: 
2471