The effect of corporate social responsibility on sustainable development with the mediating role of employee participation in knowledge-based companies

Background and objectives: sustainable development is a process that envisions adesirable future for human societies in which living conditions and resource use meet humanneeds without compromising the integrity, beauty, and stability of vital systems. knowledgebasedcompanies today are among those companies that act as factories for convertingknowledge into goods and services. in this regard, organizational social responsibility can bethe basis for the sustainable development of companies and organizations. therefore, thisresearch aims are to examine the role of the organization’s social responsibility for sustainabledevelopment in terms of mediating the participation of employees of knowledge-basedcompanies.methods: this research is applied in terms of purpose, descriptive survey and correlation interms of method. field and library methods, literature reviews, and standard questionnaireswere used to collect information. the statistical population consisted of 578 senior andmiddle managers of knowledge-based companies in the science and technology park ofsharif university of technology, tehran- iran, and 231 people were sampled using cochran’sformula method and stratified random sampling. a standard questionnaire was also usedto collect information. the validity of the questionnaire was checked and confirmed usingconvergent and divergent validity and confirmatory factor analysis and its reliability usingcronbach’s alpha coefficient, joint and combined reliability. finally, the collected data wasanalyzed using spss and smartpls software’s.findings: based on the results of the kolmogorov-smirnov test, the significance of thistest was calculated for all indicators less than 0.05 and 0.000, and due to the lack of normaldistribution of the data, the smart pls software was used. the overall fitting criterionwas calculated to be 0.551, which means that the model fits well. when testing the mainhypothesis, a coefficient of 0.408 was calculated, showing that employee participationexplains 40% of the impact of social responsibility on sustainable development. the pathcoefficient of the sub-hypotheses for these relationships is above 0.5 and the significance isabove 1.96. it can be said that the sub-hypotheses of the research are confirmed.conclusion: according to the indicators obtained, the organization’s social responsibilitypositively and significantly impacts sustainable development and employee participation.the positive role of employee participation in sustainable development was also confirmed.finally, the results showed that employee participation can mediate the impact of socialresponsibility on sustainable development.