Dominik Fischer at the IAMB Conference in Dubai

Dominik Fischer, researcher at the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin | LEIZ, was invited to speak about the interrelation of CSR and strategy at the fall meeting of the International Academy of Management and Business (IAMB) in Dubai. The conference took place in the Dubai Knowledge Village, where international universities are gathered in order to foster research and knowledge in the UAE.
Fischer discussed the effects of globalization on corporate strategy regarding the need for junior managers. CSR can be used to attract and retain them in a competitive market for talent. In doing so, he partly refers to a study he conducted jointly with LEIZ researcher Dr. Matthias Sohn about ‘Junior Managers Project Choices in the Oil Industry’. In his paper, Dominik Fischer highlighted the importance of junior managers in a strategic context and conceptually elaborated their contribution as a critical human resource for a firm’s future success. Besides being an important contribution to a company successfully competing in global markets today, junior managers will be in senior positions one day and actively shape the CSR profile of a firm in the future.
In his talk, Fischer used some of the study’s findings to underline his arguments which indicate that CSR is a critical variable in junior managers’ voluntary decision process for projects. After highlighting that companies considering CSR issues as a part of their strategy mostly perform better compared to their peer group in the long run, he focused on the fact that such corporations have an advantage when it comes to safeguarding access to resources with respect to transaction costs. After that, Fischer pointed out what most studies of consumer behavior indicate as well when it comes to financials: CSR is still the second most important factor in decision making. However, pure opportunistic behavior can be excluded in this choice because, as the study indicates, junior managers put CSR before personal benefits such as a low sickness rate. Considering current trends, it can be expected that CSR variables will partly substitute the importance of financial impacts in the near future regarding a project’s attractiveness for junior managers.