Embedding CSR into Corporate Culture

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Morpheus says to Neo: “I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” And so it is with socially responsible corporate leadership. The choice, first and foremost, is whether or not to pursue it. This is an important step for executive managers whose decisions greatly impact society. Indeed, this impact is all the more significant, given that ordinary citizens do not vote for corporate executives. If they did, they might demand better results than the massive social harms inflicted by Enron-like scandals in conjunction with record high levels of executive pay. It is no wonder that American satisfaction with the size and influence of major corporations remains near the all-time low of 30% (Gallup Poll, 2012),¹ following decades of low public approval and confidence ratings (Frederick, 2006). Arguably, the corporation as one of society’s major institutions should garner more public support than that. After all, many transnational corporations have revenues greater than the gross domestic products of small nation-states. Ideally, such power should stem from the public’s trust that these corporations will serve the greater good. However, there are reasons why corporations operate without necessarily enjoying high levels of public confidence, although there are countervailing developments as well.

In his highly influential book Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan examines the role of metaphor in theories of organization. His thesis is that all theories of organization and management result in implicit images or metaphors that lead us to see, understand, and manage organizations in distinctive yet partial ways. In this way, metaphor that is drawn from theory has far-reaching consequences. Morgan adds that although metaphors can create valuable insights, they can also be misleading, because of their incompleteness and biases (Morgan, 1997, p. 4). Taking this viewpoint into consideration, this chapter compares the image of self cast by standard economics with representations of the self cast by other theoretical perspectives.¹ This analysis is designed to shed light on a sense of self befitting corporate social responsibility (CSR) leadership.

This chapter takes up the proposition that a sense of self for corporate social responsibility (CSR) leadership is ripe for re-envisioning. It starts by examining two highly influential classifications of business and society research, one longitudinal and the other stationary. Although these classifications overlap in content, they differ in construction, the first representing an unfolding of research over time and the second a snapshot of cumulative research.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of socially responsible executive leadership by modeling the absence of it. It builds on the new model of corporate social performance (CSP) in Chapter 3 to illustrate the downfalls of amoral executive decision making. More specifically, this chapter illustrates the organizational dynamics that are inevitable when the executive manager ignores, suppresses, or denies the role of values in decision making, a mind-set dubbed “normative myopia.”¹ This mind-set inevitably leads to socially neglectful organizations that cannot respond to the value-based expectations of the company’s stakeholders. As will be seen, the executive’s influence on corporate culture drives this outcome.

The reformulated corporate social performance (CSP) model in Chapter 3 provides a blueprint for socially responsible leadership. The present chapter elaborates on this blueprint by modeling some organizational dynamics necessary for responsible social performance, which can now be understood as a quest to balance economic and ecological (sustainability) goals. The executive mind-set needed for this effort is typified as “normative receptivity,” which means that the executive consciously strives to incorporate values in decision making. The importance of this mind-set was underscored in Chapter 4, which identified the ponderous risks to society posed by the lack of it.

According to the model of value attunement, discovery leaders express an affirmative willingness to contribute to the social good by providing stakeholders with economic and ecological benefits. To that end, they direct their firms to understand and respond to stakeholder interests, which are value based and typically articulated in the language of rights and justice. In other words, discovery leaders exhibit a sense of responsibility that is above and beyond negative duty or responses that are forced by legal or social pressure. This sense of positive duty, a distinguishing feature of socially responsible leadership, can be expressed vis-à-vis mutualistic economizing.

Chapter 4 established that amoral executives who do not recognize the importance of values will direct organizations to be socially neglectful and operate far from the efficient frontier of providing society with the most economic and ecological benefits possible. In contrast, Chapter 5 modeled a new frontier for corporate responsibly in terms of value-attuned organizations. These organizations are led by executives who understand the significance of values and seek to discover those that are important to their stakeholders. Again, stakeholders typically articulate their value preferences in the language of rights and justice, as when consumers assert the right to safety and fair compensation if products cause harm. Discovery executives understand that these ethical values should be incorporated in their quest to serve societal well-being. Chapter 6 elaborated on the practical mechanisms that discovery executives can use in this quest, which is aimed at providing society with economic and ecological benefits and, whenever possible, the simultaneous provision of these benefits in the form of mutualistic economizing or triple bottom-line business. According to Chapter 6, the ability of executives to activate constructive value-adept decision making in organizational culture is paramount to this effort.