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RESPONSE Project - Understanding and Responding to Societal Demands on Corporate Responsibility
RESPONSE is the
first attempt to study systematically CSR as both an organizational
practice and an individual behaviour. There is only so much that can
be accomplished with organizational initiatives such as codes of ethics
and social reports or even the creation of specialized structures
handling the diverse issues related to the company’s activities’ impact
on society. The fundamental problem lies in facilitating the adaptation
of individual mindsets, emotional attitudes and values to the
appreciation of the full impact of decisions and actions on the
well-being of internal and external stakeholders.
A
second important distinction that is made is in considering the
fundamental basis of the problem not only lying in the lack of “care”
for the impact of corporate activities on society, but also by poor
understanding of the complex set of stakeholder expectations companies
face and attempt to satisfy.
At the heart of the issue lies the gap
between managers’ and stakeholders’ understandings of the company’s
responsibility towards society.
- Why is it that some companies seem to
have a much more refined sense of what societal actors expect from
them, than other companies do?
- What factors might explain this crucial
difference? And what can be done to attenuate, or even eradicate, those
factors?
These are the questions that RESPONSE is
trying to address in its 3 year study of corporate responsibility
practices developed by 19 European and North American multinationals.
In
doing so, the project moves beyond explanations based on the industry
and the cultural environment in which the company acts, to inquire
about the impact of organizational and individual characteristics on
the managers’ ability to understand stakeholders expectations.
Organizational characteristics such as the firm’s strategy, its
organizational structure (including its governance), its knowledge and
learning management processes, for example, are important pieces of the
puzzle. At an individual level the project aims to understand how
personal values, emotional traits and cognitive reasoning can explain
the manager’s perception of its company’s social responsibility as well
as the willingness and ability to integrate this understanding in the
day-to-day decisions and actions.
Finally, we
want to assess how effective different training approaches are in
developing the individual traits that we find to be connected to
socially responsible behaviour. Are the currently available executive
education approaches sufficient to enhance managers’ consciousness of
the social implications of their work? If not, what other approaches
might provide the missing pieces?
Project Objectives
- Study two fundamental questions:
- What do
multinationals understand their responsibilities towards society to be
and how does that differ from what their stakeholders believe they should be?
- How do multinationals respond to societal demands?
- Understand how the answers to these questions vary across cultural, legal, industry and organizational contexts
- Identify
and quantify the factors that contribute to explain why certain
companies understand their stakeholders’ expectations better than others
- Test the effectiveness of different types of training approaches on the development of social consciousness in managers
For more information please have a look at the official RESPONSE web site: http://www.insead.edu/ibis/response_project/index.html or contact Maurizio Zollo (Tel: +33 (0)1 60 72 44 74, email:
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