CSR Orientation: Exploring Orientation of Indian Management Students towards CSR.

Abstract

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030 have prompted governments all over the world to reform their development plans and match their national goals with the SDGs. Governments may work together to achieve sustainable development, and corporations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) can play a key role in achieving the SDGs. If implemented in its entirety, the recent legislative provision of a CSR mandate under the New Companies Act 2013 is likely to provide a sizable financial corpus for socio-economic and developmental initiatives. As a result, it is critical to raise knowledge of CSR among current and future generations in order to ensure that it is implemented effectively and that CSR funds are used wisely and appropriately. The purpose of this study was to look into the CSR orientation of business students who would be future managers and will play a key role in putting the CSR mandate into action. The study was conducted on 450 MBA 2nd-year students to see how they felt about the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary components of CSR orientation. A total of 150 each from marketing management, finance management and human resource management students were chosen using a random stratified sampling approach and a descriptive survey method. The findings demonstrated that there is significant difference amongst marketing, finance and human resource management students. Marketing students were highly oriented towards the economical component, human resource students were highly oriented towards the ethical and discretionary components and finance students were more oriented towards legal and discretionary components of CSR orientation. The results pointed to the necessity for positive attitudes toward the CSR requirement, as well as interventions in business school curricula and training programmes to ensure successful CSR implementation and community benefit.