Purpose—In the current flow of sustainable development, corporate social responsibility practices and their related supporting factors become vital foundations for running a business successfully. This paper's objective is to identify the relationships among environmental regulations, corporate social responsibility practices, and ethical culture affecting business performance under the stakeholder theory.

Design/methodology/approach—The designation of an implemented questionnaire follows a quantitative approach. The outcome was 107 valid responses collected from various industries and company sizes in Viet Nam using the method of convenience sampling. The PLS-SEM modeling was used to test every hypothesis of the research model.

Findings—The study analysis suggested that corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and ethical culture (EC) have significantly positive relationships with business performance (BP). Conversely, environmental regulations (ER) indirectly affect firm performance by promoting CSR practices of organizations. In addition, the ethical factor is revealed to have a positive significance in the relationship with CSR practices.

Originality/value - The results of this paper contribute more detailed insights to the firm strategists on how to drive business effectively in terms of sustainable development management and CSR engagement through the combination of incorporating ethical culture management and corporate social responsibility practices. Additionally, it brings further implications for consideration of business prosperity aligning with CSR pursuing and the environmental regulations enacted by the government due to society's needs.

Keywords: Environmental Regulations, Corporate Social Responsibility Practices, Ethical Culture, Business Performance