ETHICS & SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Organizational managers, especially the for-profit business organizations seem to be a favourite target of the news media. Their social responsibility or lack of social responsibility always gets everyone’s attentions. This is because they play an important role in our society. This organization controls almost all the resources and provides the goods and services for the society.

Sometimes we always ask either the organization is being responsible or can they improve their contribution to society. If we feel they are not being responsible, we will ask why and what are they going to do about it. Fortunately, we don’t always dwell on the negatives, but we also commend on the positives.

There are people that argue on organization being socially responsible. For us to understand this argument, we need to understand with whom the organization responsible and how big the responsibility is. For those who argue about this says that organizations do have social responsibility but not to the society or the stakeholders, but to the stockholders. The main reason is because these organizations attend strictly to their economic interests.

Using time frame, we can differentiate between social responsibility and social responsiveness. Social responsibility is an obligation of a firm to pursue long-term goals that are good for society. Being socially responsible, it reflects the desire to do something good because it is the moral and ethical thing to do. An easy example for organizations being socially responsible is by promoting the awareness programme, for instant, the Aspin Skiing Company, built a green building in US in purpose of environmentally sustainable. Social responsiveness, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic. It focuses on medium and short-term goals. Organization’s desire is to respond to changing societal norms and demands. The organization being socially responsive when a firm engages in actions in response to some popular social needs. For example, KFC sell a bookmark to the customers’ to help the hunger society in Africa.

Now, think of a people who work with the alcohol manufacturer, tobacco companies, or food manufacturers whose products have high fat content, can be socially responsible to the society. Some companies produce products that can injure and even kill people. It might be difficult for a person who feels strongly about the social role of business and who is strongly committed to the idea of businesses being socially responsible. However, just because a person working with a company whose products can injure or even can kill people doesn’t make that person is socially irresponsible. He or she still can be responsible to the society by giving strong commitment in educating people about their products and what the misuse of these products can do.

All organizations have shared values as defined by their culture and these values do guide decisions and actions. However, in companies that practice value-based management, these values reflect a broad-based commitment to being socially responsive. The important or value-based management is embrace a social component-a commitment to making decisions and taking actions that are in the best interests of an organization’s broad spectrum of stakeholders.

Most typical business executive are seen as a morally upstanding, ethical and responsible individuals. They don’t have two different sets of ethical standard for business activities and for his personal life. Unfortunately, an organizations can knowingly or unknowingly steer people into making ethically questionable decisions and involve with ethically questionable actions because of the processes, systems and rewards it has in place.

An organizations can shape employee ethics and attitudes toward socially responsible by emphasizing and rewarding those ethical and socially responsible behaviours that are desired. The employees will engage in these behaviours if they see that it is the one that are important and supported. For example, a well-known personal-care product manufacturer, the Tom’s of Maine, have a culture where every managerial decision in light of the ethical value the company espouses. If they follow the culture, they are rewarded and if they don’t, they are subtly encourage to rethink decisions they have made or the actions they have taken.

Every country has different values that have been practice. Some country such as US, bribing the local government officials is norms. For example, Coca-Cola has consistently turned down requests for bribes from Egyptian officials but the company still has managed to gain support and public trust by sponsoring a project to plant fruit trees. Because of the differences, managers need to change their ethical behaviour if they want to market their products in that particular country.