The Importance Of Corporate Responsibility

Corporate Responsibility

It is almost impossible for any person to live a completely private or independent life. Therefore, people in the same society depend on each other for survival. Consequently, it implies that everybody in the society owes a responsibility to other people living in that society as well as to the environment they live in. The same way, one society owes a responsibility to all the others living around it. In a corporate or business environment, an organization has several stakeholders, including investors, suppliers, customers, employees, and the society as a whole. To all of them, it owes responsibility. Many individuals and businesses tend to define corporate responsibility in monetary terms; hence, they end up giving

However, this is not so, as corporate responsibility goes far beyond money; it touches on the culture and ethics of the company and its engagement and concern for real-life issues of its stakeholders. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept that touches far beyond the demand and supply aspects of the market (Husted, 2015). Corporate responsibility is, therefore, an essential part of businesses because it helps the company to attain its goals and objectives. It is quite a tremendous addition to the building of the company’s reputation which the company uses to win and maintain its stakeholders, including the most important people in the company’s existence: employees, customers, and investors. According to Saniuk and Szczanowicz (2014), many companies fail in the implementation of CSR because they either lack awareness of the concept itself or have limited knowledge of the concept’s aims, objectives, and results of corporate social responsibility management. Another contributing factor for this failure is because this responsibility is forced by the general

According to the definitions given above, viewing corporate responsibility only in monetary terms is apparently short of the whole essence of corporate responsibility. A wealthy company could be giving millions to charity; however, if by so doing, it compromises the welfare of its stakeholders, especially employees and customers, or pollutes the environment from which the rest of the community derives their livelihoods, then the amount given to charity does not equate to corporate responsibility. As implied by Bronn (2011), corporate social responsibility is more than just giving to charity and contributing to social functions. It involves the creation of good company vibes. It requires that the company goes a step further to demonstrate an interest in creating more value as opposed to just increasing financial returns to investors. Bronn (2011) goes further to link corporate responsibility to marketing by introducing corporate social marketing which he defined as a behavioral change strategy that profits the community while emphasizing on the generation of commercial interest. He further quotes another definition which states that corporate social marketing encompasses marketing initiatives which involve at least one