The study aimed at determining the impact of strategic philanthropy on financial performance in Tanzania. Four secondary objectives were developed with their respective research questions to achieve this. Stakeholder-, slack resources-, legitimacy-, intergroup emotions-, affective events-, and integrative- theories were utilized, since they all supported.
To achieve this, Tanzania’s telecommunication industry was considered whose mobile network operators had been well active in executing strategic philanthropy. The mixed-methods research approach, supported by the convergent parallel research design was adopted where, results were checked through both quantitative- and qualitative- angles. Quantitative data was collected through the operators’ financial reports from the year 2012 to 2019. Qualitative data was collected using a 34-Item 5-Point Likert scale questionnaire, 30-Item 5-Point Likert scale questionnaire, and a 10-Item structured open-ended interview respectively, from the operators’ respective top-executives and employees who were sampled using the purposive sampling technique. These sets of data were imported into the SPSS 26 software for analysis. Descriptive statistics and Principal component analysis were applied to analyze the qualitative data, while curvilinear regression analysis was applied to analyze the quantitative data.
Findings revealed that strategic philanthropy impacted financial performance both directly and indirectly; a moderate investment in strategic philanthropy was found to be rather essential to reap economic benefits. Securing a healthy business was found to be the general primary reason of the operators behind executing strategic philanthropy that ultimately contributed to their financial performance. The staffs of the operators were in overall found to have positive perceptions towards the philanthropic assistance offered by their operators to the Tanzanian society, that complementarily contributed towards the operators’ financial performance. Philanthropic activities related to health and education were found to be relatively commonly executed by the operators, followed by other activities as well; these activities were believed to have contributed towards the financial performance typically.
These findings were deemed to be of significance to organization (especially in Tanzania) since they evidenced imperative information about how strategic philanthropy could impact financial performance, specifically in the context of Tanzania. Future studies on this aspect are thus highly recommended for securing further understanding on the aspect.