Impacts of corporate social responsibility on the competitiveness of tourist enterprises: An empirical case of Ben Tre, Vietnam

Abstract

This study aims at identifying the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the competitiveness of tourist enterprises in an emerging tourism region – Mekong Delta in Vietnam with an empirical case of Ben Tre Province. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, we conducted a survey of 250 respondents including directors, deputy directors, managing and running tourism businesses. Through statistical tests of scale reliability, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling, we found that there are five perspectives of CSR significantly affecting the enterprise competitiveness, including (1) human-oriented CSR, (2) social activity–oriented CSR, (3) partner-oriented CSR, (4) environment-oriented CSR and (5) product and service quality–oriented CSR. Especially, this study identified the important roles of three new elements discovered through our expert interviews and group discussions, including ‘connection between business culture development strategy and the local and native cultures’, ‘tourism products/services promoting local special features’ and ‘tourism products/services promoting green environment’. From these findings, we proposed some managerial implications for policymakers to have proper policies in promoting CSR among tourist enterprises and improving their competitiveness.

Transformational leadership, customer citizenship behavior, employee intrinsic motivation, and employee creativity

“…To continue enhancing the sector’s competitiveness and reach long-term and sustainable development, Vietnam tourism firms not only should focus on environmental sustainability and tourist service infrastructure (WEF, 2017) but also promote tourism products and service innovation (Foreign Press Center, 2018). Several studies have examined growth promotion (Kumar, 2014; Hampton et al , 2018), poverty alleviation (Truong et al , 2014), environmental management (Le et al , 2006; Luu, 2017), sustainable development (Di Giovine, 2009; Long and Nguyen, 2018; Nguyen et al , 2019), education (Buzinde et al , 2018) and customer satisfaction and loyalty (Cong, 2016; Le and Dong, 2017; Truong et al , 2017) in Vietnam’s hospitality and tourism industry. While creativity is necessary to create a unique impression of emotion for visitors that grabs their attention and creates high added value (Foreign Press Center, 2018), little research has focused on the context of Vietnam’s hospitality and tourism industry.…”

A Model for Measuring Fair Labour Justice in Hotels: Design for the Spanish Case

“…This model addresses the needs of business, labour and local development, providing added value that is useful to promote and popularize the true relevance of CSR and sustainability among clients and employees. These principles have a positive impact on the hotels that commit to them [12][13][14]16,17,[19][20][21]26,43,71,72]. The model also has implications for attracting and retaining talent because potential employees in the sector can choose those companies that have exemplary labour practices.…”

STEAM-ME: A Novel Model for Successful Kaizen Implementation and Sustainable Performance of SMEs in Vietnam

“…Several researchers, such as Long & Nguyen [39], Norazlan et al [40], Moldan et al [41], and Schoenherr [42], agreed that the sustainable performance is measured with three dimensions, namely, (1) economic performance, defined as the extent to which an organization improves its operations, market, and financial results; (2) environment performance, defined as the extent to which an organization improves its control of pollution and its resource efficiency; and (3) social performance, defined as the extent to which an organization improves its practical outcomes related to its employees and community. Considered as the key pillars of triple bottom line theory, balancing these dimensions is critical to improve organizational competitive advantages [43].…”

“…And, key criteria to judge if a scale is considered reliable include the following: (1) all corrected item-total correlations of its components are > 0.3; (2) its coefficient ≥ 0.7 [196]. After EFA and scale reliability analysis, the extracted factors are further analyzed with (1) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to affirm their unidirectionality, internal consistency, convergence value, and distinguishing value; (2) structural equation modelling (SEM) to test the validity of the proposed research model and stated hypotheses [39,43]. According to Hair et al [197] and Steenkamp & Trijp [198], these two analyses are considered appropriate if the following criteria are satisfied: (1) the significance value (pvalue) of the Chi-square test ≤ 0.05; (2) ratio of Chi-square (CMIN) over the degree of freedom (df), CMIN/df ≤ 2.00 (in some cases, CMIN/df ≤ 3.00 is also acceptable); (3) the goodness of fit index (GFI), Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), and comparative fit index (CFI) ≥ 0.90; (4) root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) ≤ 0.08; (5) overall reliability ≥ 0.6; and (6) extracted variance ≥ 0.5.…”