The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Companies Perceived Performance: A Comparative Study between Local and Foreign Companies in Jordan

This study aimed at answering a question that has been a topic of academic interest for several years, albeit receiving inadequate attention in the Jordanian literature. Particularly, the question if there was an impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the perceived business performance of two groups of companies in Jordan, local and foreign. Two more questions were interwoven to this issue, and these were investigating the extent to what companies were practicing the CSR, and if there were differences in the perceived business performance due to some companies’ characteristics such as capital, number of years in business, economic sector, and number of employees. A quantitative methodology was followed and data were collected out of 83 questionnaires. Different types of analysis were employed to test the research hypotheses; independent and one-sample t-test, multiple regression analysis and ANOVA. The study ends up with the following main findings: First: CSR was implemented among companies with differences in the practices of the environmental part of CSR, where foreign companies showed positive implementation while the local showed negative implementation. Second: there was a significant positive impact of CSR only on marketing performance. Third: this relationship did not differ when a comparison between two samples was conducted. Fourth: the analysis showed that only the perceived economic performance differs due to the type of industrial sector to which these companies belong. Keywords: