An Empirical Study of Critical Success Factors and Challenges in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Implementation: The Case of Selected Corporate Foundations in Malaysia

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become the mainstream for business activities whereby innumerable organizations rank companies based on the performance of their CSR activities, and these rankings are considerably of public interests. CSR appears as an inevitable concern for business leaders in every country. Given the substantial funds for the implementation of CSR initiatives, the top management of corporations require that CSR initiatives must be successfully implemented to contribute to the target group. Therefore, it is important to know the critical success factors and challenges of CSR initiatives. Thus, this study aims to identify the critical success factors and challenges in the implementation of CSR initiatives from the perspective of employees from four selected corporate foundations. Data was obtained through questionnaire survey and analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 20 software. The analysis shows that strategic factors contribute the most to the implementation of critical success factors of CSR initiatives then followed by marketing, human resources, finance and the environment factors. Meanwhile, there is no significant difference in the perception of critical success factors among the four selected corporate foundations. In the other hand, analysis found that the highest mean value of CSR initiative challenge is due to high cost and complicated implementation, and provide no immediate business profit. This study is expected to provide an effective guide for CSR practices in the corporate sector.