Social responsibility & sustainability
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is termed as a business technique, where the company tends to contribute towards the sustained development by providing social, economical, and environment benefits for the stakeholders. However, to provide a customer with the best product, it is important that the customer is socially satisfied with the product. According to a survey, sixty one percent of the consumers will purchase a product from a company, which is socially liable, or they will switch to other retailers if the quality and price of a product are equal. The expense of a product is external, with the involvement of a investors’s return on money. Social responsibility is known as a model of determinate corporate rules and policies, which are designed to assist the workplace environment, indiviuals, community, and the institute (Tai & Chuang, 2014). Therefore, social responsibility is all about efficient productivity and creativity of outputs.
Previous research has shown that the company’s guarantee towards becoming the leader in corporate social responsibility (CSR), often makes some charges against the company, which includes child labor and environment abuse (Tai & Chuang, 2014). While, the positive beliefs say that the consumer is not linked with the higher purchase percentage, but also with the long term loyalty of consumers and their behaviors towards the company. Social responsibility of a company is vital, when measures are taken to overview the social capacity of a company. Consumers are most likey to buy a product, where they think the product is socially acceptable and will show loyalty towards it.
The most important aspect of CSR is to engage activities of social responsibility along with their business strategy (Tai & Chuang, 2014). A brand which engages its brand position on CSR, along with their business objective, is more likely to excel, than a brand engaging with a sole purpose of increasing the corporate social responsibility. The strategic use of CSR, focuses on the role of information and the way company incorporates CSR into their product differentiation plan.
In the modern world, 80% of the businesses are using corporate social responsibility as an approach to improve their customer contentment. Consumers are also purchasing products on the basis of social and environmental reputation of a firm. However, CSR is gaining more interests and producting more trends to attract the customers. Business analysis shows that the amount to customer turnover increases with the CSR implementation into its activities. It becomes easy for a company to analyze themselves, when making annual reports and finding customer facts.
The ambition to be successful in corporate sustainability has been increased in the recent years. In enhance in this perspective, the knowledge, skills and motivation needed in leading sustainability have been formed. Companies have made serious efforts in maintaining their business models, redefining their core business processes, and making new strategic decisions. This helps in social and environmental sustainability. However, this progress varies across regions, in sectors and national level.
The global challenge that business leaders face to make people aware about the social issues, becomes more viable (Tai & Chuang, 2014). The ways business professionals react to the moral values, helps in enhancing the ethical business. Ethical leadership is important in a business person, as it helps in improving the sustainability of social goals, and turns out to be the tool for effective moral values.
CSR is becoming to be a moral responsibility, as well as an positive factor in financial development. Most of the companies nowadays, are reacting to the social and environmental demands by the consumers. CSR factors have changed in the due course of time, as have the corporate programs in the market. A firm’s social obligations are based on the purchases made on the basis of CSR performance, recycling methods, and the reaction of production on the environment. It is also important for a company to grow its social standards to a global application. In this context, the company may choose and trade in any country.
Business Ethics
Ethics in a business environment are made by the ethical leadership. It is also a associated with the consistent growth and development of a global economy (Perry, Wood & Fernie, 2015). Ethics observed by the business leaders are closely analyzed by the public, media, shareholders, and the stakeholders. In any type of industry, the basic relation between a company and consumer relies on trust. If a company does not observes, ethical practices, consumers will relatively trust them less, which leads to a lower satisfaction from consumers (Perry, Wood & Fernie, 2015). When there is no satisfaction, trust does not exist. Ultimately, lower satisfaction and trust leads to failure of a business. Poor ethical decisions also lead to less trust from the company’s shareholders, and from the employees of the organization as well.
Many researches in the past, have discussed about the ways to develop ethical behaviors, under which the corporate leaders can work, and built consumer trust accordingly. Ethical behaviors tells about how the company operates in the ethical environment and why it was formed in such environment. Due to the lack of ethical beliefs in a company, they mostly loose customers and have to regain them by forming new strategies.
Ethics in business is long term concern for researchers and business leaders, but the basic concern may vary with time (Kolk, 2016). Mind set of business ethics are also different across industry, culture, and the operation in decision making. Consumers behave on the priority of their own ethical values, before shopping a product and commiting to it (Quarshie, Salmi & Leuschner, 2016). Values of business leaders impact the culture of the firm, and they establish ethics from the leadership roles. Business ethical values could cause a positive or negative impact to the company, and even help the consumers to buy the right products and services. In this regard, code of ethics and the practical ethical values are the organizational ethics tools, which play a vital role in the concept of business ethics.
In a research, 6000 employees of 263 companies were analyzed. The study portrayed high levels of internal ethical values, collective commitment, which helped in the organizational citizenship (Quarshie, Salmi & Leuschner, 2016). Multiple factors are involved in the use of ethical codes and the impact of these practices.
Practically, differences in the choosing of laws and its training can make cultural differences in business code of ethics. It can vary across countries, which have their own business and public laws. According to a survey in Canada, 131 companies were sampled, and the result was; 45% of the companies either did not had any code of ethics, or didn’t make the code public (Hartman, DesJardins & MacDonald, 2014). According to another study, present generations employees violate more ethics, then the previous generations (Hartman, DesJardins & MacDonald, 2014). This type of behavior can enable more violation of ethics, and it can also be helpful for an organization to create a group to diminish this effect. There is also a possibility that people in the same industries, like financial and accounting experts, may observe high level of ethics, than the other industries. Therefore, in business environment, code of ethics are to be analyzed according to the instructions set by the company. They need to take measure so that it does not deviate to the ligher side of economic disorder.
References
Hartman, L. P., DesJardins, J. R., & MacDonald, C. (2014). Business ethics: Decision making for personal integrity and social responsibility. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kolk, A. (2016). The social responsibility of international business: From ethics and the environment to CSR and sustainable development. Journal of World Business, 51(1), 23-34.
Perry, P., Wood, S., & Fernie, J. (2015). Corporate social responsibility in garment sourcing networks: Factory management perspectives on ethical trade in Sri Lanka. Journal of Business Ethics, 130(3), 737-752.
Quarshie, A. M., Salmi, A., & Leuschner, R. (2016). Sustainability and corporate social responsibility in supply chains: The state of research in supply chain management and business ethics journals. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, 22(2), 82-97.
Tai, F. M., & Chuang, S. H. (2014). Corporate social responsibility. Ibusiness, 6(03), 117.
