Knowledge and Values: The Importance of Personal Social Responsibility for Education, Management, and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Social responsibility is a multidimensional construct which manifests itself in many areas of human life – in both the private and professional spheres. In business, people’s individual attitudes are often the starting point for organizational activities. Even the most ethical business behavior, if not matched by changes on the part of individuals, will not create a change on a larger scale. Thus, personal social responsibility can be defined as a key element of corporate social responsibility (CSR), because the implementation of this idea in business depends on the behavior of the individuals working in the company. The main purpose of the article is to investigate published knowledge concerning the concept of personal or individual social responsibility (PSR or ISR) and the personal or individual social responsibility scale. The authors made a systematic literature review, analyzing full-text scholarly articles published between 2000 and 2021. International databases and journal libraries – EBSCO, JSTOR, Mendeley, Wiley Online Library, Web of Science, and Scopus – were searched using the logical phrases “personal social responsibility,” “individual social responsibility,” “personal social responsibility scale,” and “individual social responsibility scale.” The analysis shows that the concept of individual/personal social responsibility is considered in the literature in various contexts, though few works are available on this concept and even fewer describe its indicators. Using keywords relevant to the area, 14 publications were selected for analysis. This leads to the conclusion that there is a research gap in this area, which the authors intend to fill in the course of further research.