Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics in Global Business

business
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Essay
Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR is one of the most discussed topics in present
literature and global business organisations. Almost every global company is engaged in
CSR’s to some extent and therefore 90% of global companies formally report on CSR that is
not limited to Australia or America only (Glavas, 2016). Although, corporate ethics have
increased significantly, mechanisms that relates corporate ethics with firm performance is
very little known for which most of the researchers and authors focusses on study related to
CSR and use of business ethics in global business environment. Earlier, studies related to
CSR and ethics in business operations gave more emphasis on firm’s reputation employed on
external perspectives and associations with external stakeholders only. Petite attention was
given to corporate ethics in firm’ internal practices even though it had great potential to
transform business practices into ethical move. But, things have changed dramatically in the
past few years where scholars and researchers are revealing inter-relationship between
corporate ethics, organisational citizen behaviour (OCB), employee’s commitment as well as
financial position of organisations ( Kim & Thapa, 2018).
According to Chin, Shin, Choi, & Kim (2013), “Of the three dimensions of corporate
ethics, internal ethics is most strongly related to employees’ collective organizational
commitment.” When employees recognise that the workplace in which they are working
adheres ethical and legal standards, they get more committed to their work as well as behaves
in a manner that aligns with organisational goals and objectives. Moreover, internal ethics not
only fosters internal environment of organisations but also provides with positive and ethical
relationship between employer and employees (Gökmen & Öztürk , 2012). Reflecting upon
present trend in literature and global business environment, the concept of CSR and business

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ethics have become primary factor that needs to be present in institutional and macro level
(Tellez, 2017). However, Glavas (2016) argues that due to various schools of thoughts, there
are various over lapping and confusing definitions of CSR among which words have been
used interchangeably like corporate citizenship (OCB), stakeholder theory, corporate social
performance and sustainable development. The author states that since every scholar made
different definition for CSR, challenges and opportunities in accepting them can be present
depending upon the situation. The challenge is difficulty in understanding CSR results due to
the lack of clarity in definition. This confusion has made many scholars implement the study
of CSR and ethics in their studies related to current global businesses. Yet, opportunity can
be realised since CSR is a broader subject for which there is a great potentiality in giving
variances about how organisations perceive CSR. For instance, set of employees may
perceive CSR like a moral obligation to the firm while others may feel that CSR shall be used
to improve relationships among organisations and its stakeholders only. However, these
differences in perceptions can further affect employees’ attitude and work behaviour
according to variation degrees (Chun, Shin, Choi, & Kim, 2013).
According to Pisan, Kourula, Kolk & Meijer (2017), CSR have spread extensively
among global societies on the part of researchers as well as practitioners. A new
infrastructure named CSR has emerged and is practiced in multitude of companies across
civil, public and corporate society playing role for development in each sector. In academics
and journals, scholars are also paying great attention in uses of ethics and CSR in which few
of them demonstrates their growing interest in both organisational perspective as well as
management angle (Pisan, Kourula, Kolk, & Meijer, 2017). The authors showed urgency in
making further investigation regarding CSR practices especially in developing nations as
persuasive institutional abysses weakens their settings. Therefore, over the previous year’s
scholars have focussed much upon reasons behind such abysses when assessing organisations