Essay Example on Corporate Social Responsibility: Enhancing Brand Value & Improving Society

Intorduction

Corporate Social responsibility defines an organization's effort to improve society. CSR model enables a business to be socially responsible to the community and its stakeholders (Mostafa & Shen, 2019). The improvement is either through monetary donations or non-profit's implementation of environmentally friendly workplace policies. CSR enhances the brand value of a business because people start to notice the good work done by the company, develop trust; thereby, building a completely positive image of the brand. Consumers associate themselves with socially responsible organizations. Additionally, CSR enhances employees’ engagement, improves their association with the management, and increases the organization's production. The practice of corporate social responsibility raises awareness of the impacts a company is facing on the environmental, social, and economic traits of the society. Also, CSR makes employers and employees develop a strong bond with the environment surrounding them.

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A1: Primary and Secondary Stakeholders

The primary stakeholders are individuals with direct interests within the company. The primary stakeholders that influence Paradigm Toys are management and employees. Both owners and employees form the foundation of success and failure of Paradigm Toys. The primary stakeholders' financial needs depend on the company's stability and its ability to always improve financial growth. The secondary stakeholders have no direct interest in the company. The secondary stakeholders influencing Paradigm Toys include governmental agencies and competitors. Although secondary stakeholders lack direct financial interest with Paradigm Toys, they are indirectly impacted the company’s decisions.

A2: Responsibility to Stakeholders

The board of directors at Paradigm Toys can meet their CSR to both primary and secondary stakeholders in various ways. The first way is to play the oversight management role by ensuring that the business has strategic systems to help inefficient management of significant risks, which may harm the company's reputation and cause legal problems on issues linked to social and environmental effects. For example, the management at Paradigm Toys can implement a way of reducing the carbon footprint generated by Paradigm Toys because it has negative impacts on the environment. To accomplish this, Paradigm Toys must assess their production process and mode of packaging. The company will make significant changes in the communication sector by completely shifting to electronic communication mode. Electronic communication will minimize the use and wastage of paper materials in all departments. Additionally, the toys will be packaged using more biodegradable materials, which can be reused or recycled by the customers. Also, Paradigm Toys will use clean energy resources to minimize pollution generated by the production of toys. The change will content the governmental regulatory policies concerning the protection activities of the environment by the company. The action will also enable Paradigm Toys to demonstrate to the employees and consumers that they are concerned about the global community. Additionally, the company will benefit through reduced costs and reallocation of funds to develop an improved organization for all stakeholders.

The second way is becoming more involved in humanitarian activities for kids like community-based children shelters or Toys for Tots. Customers are one of the primary stakeholders, and their children are indirect stakeholders because they play with the Paradigm Toys. Among the primary missions of Paradigm Toys is offering the joy of playing with toys internationally. However, implementing that mission is challenging to the underserved children due to the low socio-economic environments. To combat this challenge Paradigm Toys Company will form a partnership with community-based children shelters or Toys for Tots within the areas they serve. Charitable interventions are among the major aspects of a socially responsible corporation. Staffs in such corporations feel contented because they are part of the company that contributes good things to the community, and the competitors become more obliged to perform similar activities. Due to these actions, Paradigm Toys will be viewed as a company that contributes more than economic benefits to the community. Also, consumers will be motivated to buy more products because they will also be contributing to a bigger plan of creating happiness for children in need. Another important role that the management can play is to ensure financial stability because the primary stakeholder depends on the company for finances. The leadership can put enough financial resources to the implementation of particular investment plans for the generation for more income in the future.

B1: Importance of Ethical Culture

The behavior of a company and the manner of carrying out businesses with the external and internal stakeholders reflect the way society views them. Ethics is a personal moral view of what is wrong and what is right. In some organizations, there is a certain principle that all employees and management need to follow. The aim is to reduce or eliminate the exploitation of people or conflicts of interest. Decisions in a company can be made individually or as a team. Nonetheless, the decisions are typically subject to the culture practiced in the company. Organizations can change the local communities around them through the development of economic growth because they buy and sell products to the community. Additionally, organizations can experience a loss of customers and employees if they fail to maintain a specific level of ethical actions and decisions.

Development of an ethical culture in a company is vital as it makes sure that staffs work morally, they are honest, and serve customers with integrity to increase consumers' satisfaction. Ethical culture enhances workers' morale, fosters a retained and involved workforce, and enriches the company's commitment towards the set goals. Also, organizational ethical culture establishes guidelines like procedures and policies that offer enough knowledge to employees. The guidelines help employees understand what to do during controversial or hard circumstances. Also, ethical culture distinguishes the rights and wrongs by considering the social norms and constructs of society. The ethical culture in an organization makes employees feel valued, protected from discrimination and retaliation, privileged, and working in a just environment. A company with an ethical culture attracts more investors; hence, more income due to the good image displayed. Although employers are running a business, they should treat employees as humans by being ethical to promote job satisfaction and increased production. Establishing a business environment that treats people ethically, develops strategic methods of solving ethical dilemmas.

B1A: Fostering Ethical Culture

Leaders in Paradigm Toys can foster ethical culture by developing ethical guidelines, being a role model, promoting accountability and transparency, empowerment, and displaying their interest to the community. The leadership can create ethical guidelines to indicate policies and standards to be followed by staff to make sure that the employees work ethically. Also, Paradigm Toys' leaders can promote ethical culture by being role models. For instance, they can make choices that display ethical culture, ensure that products sold to consumers are safe and of good quality. Another vital trait of an ethical leader is accountability and transparency. Ethical leaders should own their actions and make the required improvements like attending leadership meetings or conferences discussing ethics matters.

Also, leaders ought to maintain transparency, empower employees through training, and encourage positive communication. Additionally, leaders in Paradigm Toys can also foster ethical culture by showing interest in the community by attending various activities involving humanitarian acts. Another way of promoting ethical culture in an organization is developing the employment and retention policies that aid the firm to hire people with particular ethical values. The employment and retention policies ensure that the workforce comprises persons with ethical behaviors throughout their stay in Paradigm Toys.

B2: Ethics Audit

An ethics audit is the process of comparing the character of an employee and the policies and procedures provided by a company's guidelines. Companies use audits to retain ethical cultures. An ethics audit is vital as it offers an assessment of the way an organization follows its ethical policies (Hofmann, 2016). It also assesses if the behavior practiced in an organization impacts the society positively through economic success. Additionally, an ethics audit motivates continuous ethical practices by the organization involved to follow the past outline of ethical principles when doing business. An ethics audit evenly considers all departments of an organization including the formal and informal systems working to formulate ethical culture used by that company. Different ways of conducting ethical audits include analyzing documents, training, observations, interviews, and surveys. The auditor uses a checklist, makes notes, and tallies marks over a wide range of required ethical values to identify the score of a business's ethics. Comparisons are made easier if the ethics-linked procedures and policies are more specific and descriptive.

B2A: Value of an Ethics Audit

Leaders in the Paradigm Toys Company can use the ethics audit in various ways. One value of the ethics audit is to determine the areas with ethical gaps. An effective ethics audit offers a deeper analysis of the company's structure and ways of handling ethical issues in all departments. Also, leaders can identify the activities causing ethical dilemmas and develop better standards and policies to describe their anticipations and results. Leadership can also recognize effective strategies, which can be implemented in areas with weaknesses. Ethics audit provides more understanding of the anticipated ethical values by the society to ensure that Paradigm Toys creates ethical guidelines that are acceptable by the community. Also, leadership in Paradigm Toys can benefit from ethics audits by ensuring that internal control measures are put in place and channeled to aiding managers and employees to work ethically. For instance, the company can establish an ethical code of behavior to direct staff while interacting with the buyers to make sure their code of conduct meets the customers' expectations.

C1: Ethical Dilemma

In a hospital setting, there is an ethical dilemma of distributing a new medicine, which is cheaper and largely beneficial to a large population of patients but has severe side effects on a smaller population. When new medicines are produced, they usually have some side effects due to other complications pf the patients or incompatibility during drug interactions with the body system. When the new medications are released, the healthcare providers are equipped with their benefits and side effects. The side effects are finely printed and adverse effects are smaller than the benefits; hence, the drugs are recommended for distribution. However, the lack of enough knowledge can cause ethical dilemmas to healthcare providers because they prioritize the patient's safety. Healthcare providers must choose whether to expose the adverse effects of the new medicines or only offer the benefits hoping that patients will not be affected negatively in the long run.

C2: Potential Solutions

Healthcare providers propose that enough knowledge should be offered on probable threats, side effects, and drug in...