SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY VALUES: A CROSS COUNTRY COMPARISON

This empirical study aims at finding out how similar and/or different are the future Romanian and Slovenian managers in assessing the importance of organization's social responsibility values. The assumption of the research is that most of most of students in engineering and business will hold middle management position in the near future. The sample consists of 727 undergraduate and graduate students' levels from Romania and Slovenia, two former socialist countries. The data has been collected between 2008 and 2009 in the framework of GLOBE student project , using a section of GLOBE III questionnaire, about the importance of CSR related values in critical decisions. The findings concern the similarities and significant differences between: 1) whole Romanian and Slovenian samples; 2) Romanian and Slovenian students in engineering; 3) Romanian and Slovenian students in business. Our findings revealed a trend toward convergence in the importance given to decision's effect on contribution to the economic welfare of the nation and local community, as well as on employees' professional growth and development and on environment. The biggest difference between the groups concerns the decisions' effect on firm profitability (the Romanians considering this value as more important in critical decisions than the Slovenians). The students in engineering proved to be a more homogeneous group, showing convergence in assessing the importance of eight out of fifteen social responsibility values. The biggest difference concerns the decisions' effect on firm profitability (Romanians consider it as having higher importance in critical decisions than the Slovenians). Comparison of students in business revealed convergence in assessing the importance of employees' professional growth and development and decision's effect on environment. The biggest positive difference concerns the same value of decisions' effect on firm profitability. The Romanians are well behind Slovenians in realizing the importance of decisions' effect on relationships with important partners of the organization, ethical considerations and decision's effect on long term competitive ability of the organization.