Abstract:
Growing interest is there amongst the institutes involved with research and development work,
remarkably from the developing country perspectives, to embed Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) as a key factor in judging the value of those key outputs/outcomes that they generate through
research. Yet, there exists a scarcity of first-hand information coming out from methodically carried
out research and development work. This leads to a situation where the research institutes are
heavily relied on “pure theory” and/or “strategies” that originate from alien contexts. In support of
closing this gap in the literature, this study aimed to gather expert views on the merit of taking into
account CSR as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to evaluate such outputs/outcomes as that
facilitates developing a framework accommodating such KPIs inside a well-defined Performance
Management System (PMS). The whole study was set to characterize two phases, i.e. initially, 10 top level administrators of leading research institutes functioning in commercial agriculture sectors in
Sri Lanka were subjected to an in-depth interview guided by probing questions to gather data,
followed by a Thematic Analysis assisted by the MAXQDA qualitative Data analysis software. The
analysis produced Single-Case Models and Code Maps reflecting 5 Themes aligned with another 12
Sub-themes, 32 Categories, and 119 Codes. The results, in the aggregate, underscored the importance
of Context, Policy attributes, Enablers and Organizational benefits to be gained from a well-defined
PMS. It revealed that research practices related to CSR were mentioned sparingly in the interviews
and codes related to them were not prominently co-occurred with codes related to institutional
management or research collaborations. However, the contextual issues that warrant more and
improved awareness of CSR in PMS with particular emphasis on strengthening the linkage among
CSR, commercialization and research collaboration, etc. were mentioned in association with the
theme “Research for Society's Benefits”. This points out the importance of setting Digitally-enabled
KPIs in a Data-driven PMS that includes themes of this caliber and judges precisely the value of
outputs/outcomes from research and conceptualizing them in a KPI-KPD framework to enhance the
quality of the existing PMS.
