Corporate social responsibility’s role in mental health management

Abstract

This final degree thesis aims to analyse if and how companies approach mental health within their corporate social responsibility strategies, a topic that is still often taboo for many. We start by contextualising corporate social responsibility within the company’s nonmarket strategy. Next, we discuss mental health in the workplace and how it is linked with corporate social responsibility. We explore several good practices of mental health in the workplace, and compare them with others that fail to take the employees’ mental well-being or work-life balance, among others, into account. This review is followed by a qualitative analysis that aims to shed further light on the topic. We disseminated a survey and obtained over 300 responses. Our findings suggest that people have a positive opinion about mental health issues but that companies still have more work to do to address their employees’ concerns on this matter.