Corporate Social Responsibility

¶ … organization always adopt a broad stance on social responsibility? Explain how you agree or disagree with this question and why you have this perspective. More and more organizations are making social responsibility a primary feature of their websites and the ways in which they market themselves to consumers. Starbucks promotes its sale of Fair Trade coffee; the Interface carpet company has a zero-impact model of sustainability. This can generate good publicity for the company or in some instances real cost savings.

Thus, exploring issues of social responsibility and stressing the need to give back to the community as well as register short-term profits is useful. Sometimes social responsibility can yield long-term dividends, like Toyota's highly successful hybrid the Prius. However, ultimately a company must remain in business if it is to do any kind of good at all: an insolvent company's policy on social responsibility is meaningless. Ultimately, for a publically-traded company, the shareholders are owners who expect the management to yield dividends.

A company does not have to ignore social responsibility -- indeed, doing so may be irresponsible and ignore the current market's needs. But a company should not confuse its mission with that of a nonprofit. This is unjust for the employees who are affected as well as the company's owners. Finally, there is always a question of what policies are socially responsible, as these may be controversial and not necessarily self-evident.

With this in mind, the company must also factor in practicality and the effects on profits to make an intelligent decision between different competing options and when weighing the opportunity costs of various socially responsible activities that may or may not be financially advantageous. Q2. Consider your own experience with workplace culture. Describe past and current experiences with organizational culture. Be as specific as possible and support your comments with examples. All organizations have their own, unspoken rules about how individuals should behave.

For example, some workplaces where I have been an employee have been extremely competitive. There were certain formal structures such as individual performance reviews and bonuses that incentivized cutthroat competitiveness: however, there was also an attitude amongst employees which was relatively non-supportive of the efforts of others. Cooperation was seen as a weakness and thus there was little incentive to engage in it. However, other workplaces have placed a strong emphasis on cooperation by rewarding employees by how well they work on teams.

Teamwork is a criterion in performance reviews and the input of other members on a work team is solicited when evaluating an employee. As well as reinforcing the need to cooperate institutionally, the attitude of employees at such cooperative workplaces.