Business Students’ Attitudes Toward Corporate Social Responsibility

Nowadays, more and more companies recognise the importance of social responsibility. This activity is not simply a marketing trick, but a real tool to achieve a company’s goals. In this way firms can meet the requirements of customers, society, owners, employees, suppliers and any other stakeholders, in order to stay competitive in the long run. Therefore, all managers have to deal with the issue of corporate social responsibility. Why are business students’ attitudes towards corporate social responsibility important? The answer is simple: they will become employees of a company, and later on can become managers in a company, which is why they have to become acquainted with this issue. Many international empirical research studies have tried to analyse business students’ social sensitivity, and their attitude to social responsibility. Some researchers deal with the opinions of students in relation to the role of ethics education in the business curriculum. The aim of this study is to examine the social attitudes of students at the University of Debrecen Faculty of Economics and Business. The respondents had to fill in one part of the Haski-Leventhal questionnaire. They had to rank companies’ potential stakeholders according to their importance and to evaluate 18 statements in a Likert-scale format. According to our students, the three most important leadership tasks in CSR are: to achieve customer satisfaction, to ensure fair and ethical treatment of employees and to achieve fair trade with suppliers. The ranking of stakeholders in their view begins with consumers, followed by workers and owners, while the least important for them are the government, shareholders, members of society and trade unions. The majority of respondents agreed on the following statements: “Good ethics is often good business”; "The overall effectiveness of a business can be determined to a great extent by the degree to which it is ethical and socially responsible” and “Business has a social responsibility beyond making profits". In our study, we also present significant differences between the averages.