Principles of Management - Social Responsibility

Nowadays, customers in the market are no longer behaving same as in the past. They are not only just looking for high quality and good value products, but they also look at how a company reacts and response to the society. Managements need to take serious consideration on how a company response to the society, because this can directly influence the buying decision of customers, or worse, may lead to losing customers. Thus the concept of social responsibility arises. Social responsibility consist of three levels, from the basis to the highest level, they are: Social Obligation, Social Responsiveness and Social Responsibility.

Social Obligation is the basic level that company needs to meet the minimum economic and legal requirement as stated by the law. For example, a company produce soft drink may control the coloring chemical added to the drink at the level that is just meeting the domestic legal requirement. The intention for the company is to fulfill its social responsibility by complying with the law and with lowest cost, it does not necessary to further enhance the activity that is good to the society.

Social Responsiveness is the next higher level of a company’s social involvement. The idea of this level is: in additional to works done in social obligation, when there are needs by a lot of people in the society, company response to those needs to fulfill the people’s request. An example is when a real estate company is going to reconstruct a wet land for building new estate projects. Environmental protection groups arise to request the company to take action in order to protect wild life of the area, or even against its project. For social responsiveness, the company may response to the society by modify their project to retain certain percentage of the wet land and provide some distance from the construction site to the wet land to avoid disturbing the wild life. In this level, although the company response to the need of the society