Strategy Implementation and Evaluation:
It is very difficult to implement, manage and evaluate strategic social and
moral responsibility directives because these activities are harder to assess
and measure than economic ones.
Implementing the Strategy:
Managers and Employees from the entire organization are usually
involved in different ways.
Social and Moral responsibilities play a role in strategy implementation
by ensuring that the procedures for putting strategy and resources into
action are just, fair and equitable.
The Corporation is morally fulfilling its responsibilities for its
stakeholders. E.g: Johnson and Jhonson, as organization worked
together to reduce costs to maintain reasonable prices.
Strategy Evaluation:
Corporate Managers set standards to measure the intended performance
against the actual performance of their actions. E.g: Different departments
in Jhonson and Jhonson may have different values in figure to which they
can do the cost cut . But it is to be seen whether a department where
lesser cost cut is possible, is also trying to have best possible.
Managers also assess the moral and social, as well as the economic
results with their intended performance criteria.
Social Audit Concept: This concept can be used for checking, evaluating and
correcting unethical activities.
Social Audit is a way for corporations to keep track of their social
responsibility performance.
It is, measuring a firm’s performance against its social goals.
Some important issues focused under this audit are:
Minority Employment
Pollution / Environment
Working Conditions
Consumer concerns etc.
Who do this Audit:
Internal Personnels, consultants, task forces and broad level committees have
been employed to oversee and perform the social audit.
Problems with Social Audit:
The major problem in its use is measurement Techniques.
Traditional accounting Methods are not proven adequate.
Different companies use different techniques. E.g: Make a slogan and
finding out how much it is followed. Slogan could be like “We care for
customers”.
Social Audits send a message to the firm’s stakeholders, that is, “We take our
moral responsibilities to our stakeholders, seriously.
HIGH-ETHICS FIRMS AND CULTURES
High Ethics firms have High Ethics Cultures. A study was conducted by Mark
Pastin, in which he observed closely 25 High Ethics and High Profit firms like
Apple, Cadbury, Motorola, and 3M. Hereunder are the four principles of High
Ethics firms and cultures quoted by Pastin:
Principle 1: High-ethics firms are at ease interacting with diverse
internal and external stakeholder groups. The ground rules of these
firms make the good of these stakeholder groups part of the firm’s
own good.
Principle 2: High-ethics firms are obsessed with fairness. Their
ground rules emphasize that the other person’s interests count as
much as their own.
Principle 3: In high-ethics firms, responsibility is individual rather
than collective, with individuals assuming responsibility for the
firm’s actions. These firms’ ground rules mandate that individuals
are responsible to themselves
Principle 4: The high-ethics firms see its activities having a
purpose, a way of operating that members of the firm value. And
purpose ties the firm to its environment.
Putting it all together / Revision
