The profitable relationship among corporate social responsibility and human resource management: A new sustainable key factor

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been increasingly investigated assuming several perspectives. In this scenario, human resources and particularly employees are the most relevant groups of stakeholders playing a key role in all kind of organizations. Thus, this paper aims at investigating the profitable connection between CSR and human resource management (HRM). We investigate which factors determine responsible and sustainable practices in the management of the employees’ typology contracts guaranteeing CSR and its principles. The employees’ contract typology is recognized as a sustainable key factor in influencing corporate performance. Through an empirical analysis in the football industry, we investigate if the work contracts’ average duration by football players affects the performance of their clubs. Our results demonstrate that organizations assuming stabilization and long timing in the employees’ contract are going to achieve sustainable performance assuring socially responsible practices and CSR. The awareness of the existence of a correlation between the duration of the contract and the company performance could be exploited by managers of all organizations in identifying the optimal strategy and the effectiveness in the implementation of CSR. Thus, a new sustainable key factor in assuring CSR and HRM is proposed: the employees’ contractual horizon/timing.