RESPONSE - Insead

Findings: Developing Social Consciousness and SRB in Managers (Objective 4) Impact of mental silence
meditation training on decision­making
An additional dimension aimed at the level of integration of CSR in the day­to­day work of the
respondent was also selected (the level of participants’ agreement with the statement ‘I integrate CSR
into my work’) for this analysis, in order to obtain a more direct assessment of the degree to which the
manager’s psychological profile might influence the way he/she makes decisions and acts in the day­
to­day activity.
The next step was to distil from the psychological scales adopted, the factors related to the three
variables that form the social consciousness construct: cognitive capacities, emotional capacities and
personal values. That was accomplished through an exploratory factor analysis of the web­survey
response for each explanatory variable. The factors identified were then included in an OLS
regression model aiming at explaining the variation among managers in their answer to the three
types of socially responsible behaviour analysed: “do good”, “do no harm” and “I integrate CSR into
my work”. Table 29 summarises the results of this analysis.
Table 29. Results of OLS regression of SRB types on social consciousness measures
Type of SRB Dimension of Social
Consciousness
‘Do good’
‘Do no harm’
‘I integrate CSR into my
work’
Positive influence Negative influence
Cognition Moral decision criteria Economic/legal decision
criteria
Personal values Social justice Hedonism
Emotions Guilt & shame
Cognition Moral decision criteria
Personal values Achievement, Hedonism
(not expected)
Emotions ­ ­
Cognition Moral decision criteria
Personal values Universal values
Emotions Neurotic emotions
The models tested yielded a stronger explanatory power for pro­active, ‘do good’ SRB (adjusted R 2 =
35%) than for ‘do no harm’ SRB (adjusted R 2 = 15%), which is itself an interesting finding. It shows
that (a) predicting pro­active SRB is very different from predicting passive, risk­avoidance, type of
SRB., and (b) that social consciousness in managers exerts a particularly strong influence on pro­
active “do good” SRB, compared to its influence on “do no harm” type of SRB.
Importantly, these results confirm that all three dimensions of social consciousness which are part of
the model of Socially Responsible Behaviour (cognition, emotions and personal values) are significant
factors in explaining the variance in socially responsible behaviour, particularly when this is focused
towards pro­active enhancement of societal well­being (as per the definition of SRB adopted).
The next sections discuss findings regarding the impact of training on each of the constituents of SRB
­ cognitive reasoning, personal values and emotional traits.
9.3 Impact of mental silence meditation training on decision­making
The second hypothesis that we were interested to test calls for the study of the impact of training
interventions on the development of social consciousness in managers. To do so, we will proceed in
three steps:
1. Effectiveness of the meditation coaching program. Since this is the novel training approach
that this study has for the first time evaluated, the first order of priority is to assess whether its
adoption produces statistically significant pre­post intervention differences in SRB and social
consciousness. To this end, the analysis leverages the observations made in all the four
experiments pulled together, a total of 51 participating managers
2. Comparison between the standard executive education and the novel meditation training
intervention. To this end, the focus is on the experiment conducted in “High­Tech2”, where
both training approaches were utilized in a “cross­over” design. A mean comparison test
RESPONSE: understanding and responding to societal demands on corporate responsibility
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