The roles of lean and corporate social responsibility in acquisitions

Abstract

We study how Lean operations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) jointly influence manufacturers’ decisions to pursue acquisitions. Lean improves efficiency through waste reduction but also removes resource buffers, making firms more cautious about the uncertainty, integration challenges, and potential operational disruptions of acquisitions. In contrast, CSR builds stakeholder trust, buffers risk, and broadens strategic flexibility, which can reduce perceived integration risks and increase willingness to engage in acquisitions. Using data from U.S. manufacturing firms (2005–2016) and bootstrap-based conditional logit models, we find that Lean reduces acquisition likelihood, while CSR attenuates this effect. We further find that the moderating role of CSR can be different, contingent on the multi-dimensional impacts of CSR, where environmental and social CSR dimensions encourage acquisitions, whereas governance discourages them. Theoretical and managerial insights are also discussed.