Abstract

. This paper examines the association between long-term compensation and corporate social responsibility for 90 publicly traded Canadian firms. Social responsibility is considered to include concerns for social factors and the environment, 564-578; Kane, E. J., 341-359). Long-term compensation attempts to focus executives efforts on optimizing the longer term, which should direct their attention to factors traditionally associated with socially responsible executives. As hypothesized, we found a significant relationship between the long-term compensation and total CSR weakness as well as the product/environmental weakness dimension of CSR. In addition, we found a marginally significant relationship between long-term compensation and total corporate responsibility. Our findings are that executives long-term compensation is associated with a firms environmental actions, and that firms that utilize long-term compensation are more likely to mitigate product/environment weaknesses than those that do not. Implications for practice and research are discussed