THE COMBINED ROLE OF CSR, DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION, RESILIENCE, AND FIRM CHARACTERISTICS IN SHAPING ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE: A FUZZY-SET QCA STUDY

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), disruptive innovation (DI), and Organizational resilience have become central themes in understanding how firms sustain competitive advantage in dynamic environments. This study investigates how CSR, DI, organisational resilience, and firm-level characteristics jointly shape organisational performance, drawing on DI theory, stakeholder theory, contingency theory, and the principle of inequality. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on survey data from 435 firms surveyed in Bangladesh, the study distinguishes between young and mature firms to uncover age-specific causal configurations that lead to high performance. CSR is examined as internal CSR and external CSR, alongside DI, organisational resilience, firm size, firm age, industry type, and ownership type. The results reveal multiple equinoctial pathways to high performance, confirming that no single factor is universally sufficient; instead, configurations of CSR, DI, organizational resilience (OR), and firm characteristics drive outcomes. For mature firms, three high-performance paths emphasise combinations of organisational resilience, industry and ownership structure, and firm size/age, with ICSR and ECSR acting as peripheral or absent conditions. For young firms, high performance emerges from configurations involving ECSR or ICSR combined with DI, organizational resilience (OR), and structural firm attributes. Overall consistency and coverage values confirm the robustness of these causal solutions. The findings advance CSR and innovation research by separating ICSR and ECSR, demonstrating their distinct roles, and showing that DI acts as a central mechanism linking CSR to resilience and performance. The study also shows that firm age differentiates the complexity and strength of these relationships. These insights provide theoretical and managerial implications for designing CSR and innovation strategies tailored to organisational life-cycle stages.