Sayedeh Parastoo Saeidi

The mediating role of process and product innovation in the relationship between environmental management accounting and firm's financial performance

This study aims to investigate the mediating role of product and process innovation in the relationship between environmental management accounting (EMA) and firms financial performance in Iranian companies. The paper adopted the structural equation modelling (SEM) approach to test the hypotheses. The findings are based on 118 Iranian manufacturing and consumer product firms in 2014. The findings reveal that the link between environmental management accounting and financial performance is a partial mediated relationship. Positive effect of environmental management accounting on financial performance is due to the positive effect environmental management accounting has on both product and process innovation on one hand and positive affect that innovation has on financial performance on the other. These findings suggest a role for environmental management accounting in indirectly promoting firm performance through enhancing innovation.

Is Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Performance Moderated by Employees’ Individual Beliefs of Social Responsibility?

Many studies reported in the literature to date, have looked into the benefits of CSR, specifically focusing more on the financial aspect but relatively less on employees. Therefore, CSR research with regards to employees’ perspective can be considered as almost an uncharted path. Accordingly, our key research objective in this study is to find out whether employees’ individual perception and beliefs of social responsibility can play a moderating role on CSR-sales growth relationship. A total of 328 SMEs in consumer product and manufacturing industry from Tehran (capital city of Iran) were engaged in this study. Structural equation methodology based on AMOS path modeling was applied to test all hypotheses of the study. The first part of the results reveals that the CSR has a positive but weak effect on sales growth as firm performance measure. The second part discloses that the positive effect of CSR on sales growth is improved when moderator (high level of employees’ individual beliefs of social responsibility) is included.