How can you help organizations change to meet the corporate responsibility agenda?

Abstract

As corporate responsibility (CR) has developed over the past decade, companies have developed and communicated their formal values relating to environment, employees, stakeholders and governance through public statements. Many of these companies have produced formal reports covering their performance on environmental and social issues. Continued improvement and delivery of commitments depends on buy‐in not just from senior management (and the CR manager), but from managers and staff across the organization. This is only possible if there is a culture that is supportive of corporate responsibility. One key aspect of making this change is understanding how the company's culture affects corporate responsibility performance. This paper discusses some areas of organizational culture that affect CR performance including rewards and recognition, learning and managing change, awareness and involvement, questioning culture and flexibility underpinned by mutual respect. It also provides an overview of our approach for assessing and fostering a supportive culture. This is based on working with clients to manage their licence to operate in addition to extensive experience in innovation culture and safety culture. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Designing and Implementing Corporate Social Responsibility: An Integrative Framework Grounded in Theory and Practice

“…In addition to finding existing norms, CSR activities, and values inside the organization, companies must create new norms and values with respect to CSR. Lyon (2004) emphasizes that to incorporate CSR into long-term strategies and decision-making criteria, organizations must transition from a target-driven to a value-driven culture. Thus, organizations must build on their corporate values to create an organizational culture that is receptive to change and can sustain a CSR strategy over the long run.…”

Corporate social responsibility in host countries: a perspective from American managers

“…Operational managers within the MNC are critical to any successful CSR strategy (Lyon, 2004), and even if an MNC's CSR strategy is non-existent individual managers can exercise influence and 'initiate or change specific projects in order to address their personal moral concerns . .…”

“…Throughout both the business and popular media CSR issues are frequently covered, and in a search in the largely academic on-line database, Proquest Direct™, for the term 'corporate social responsibility' nearly two thousand articles were identified. Despite such wide-spread presence in the literature it is generally recognized that many if not most multinational corporations (MNCs) do not appear to have fully embraced many of the principles of CSR (Slavin, 2004), and despite the recognition that buy-in from operational managers throughout the organization is important for CSR success (Lyon, 2004) a review of online databases such as ABI/INFORM Global, Proquest Direst and Science Direct does not shed light on the degree to which operational managers actually embrace the concepts of CSR. The purpose of this paper is to examine the 18 R. L. Engle to the American civil rights movement (Davies, 2003).…”

“…These include human rights, poverty, education, health care and the environment. Regardless of the number of media mentions, corporate vision statements and supraorganizational forums and committees such as the World Economic Forum, it can be argued that it is ultimately the operational managers in an international business that will make the day-to-day decisions that can impact the effectiveness of any CSR strategy (Lyon, 2004). Despite the strongest belief by the CEO and Board of Directors in the organization's CSR goals, if the people making day-to-day decisions do not embrace these beliefs it is unlikely that the organization can realize maximum effectiveness from these strategies and policies.…”

An Exploratory Study on Sustainable ICT Capability in the Travel and Tourism Industry: The Case of a Global Distribution System Provider

“…It is important to note that successful delivery of sustainability commitments depends on buy-in not just from senior management, but from staff across the firm (Lyon, 2004). By involving employees early on in decisions, managers could promote positive identification with corporate values and encourage staff commitment to sustainability strategies (Maclagan, 1999).…”