Managing For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 16. Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics

In This Chapter

• Understanding corporate social responsibility

• Creating a CSR strategy

• Assessing your political environment

• Behaving ethically

Corporate social responsibility — CSR, for short — is a way of doing business that's rapidly gaining in popularity both in the United States and around the world. Corporate social responsibility is conducting your business in a way that has a positive impact on the communities you serve. As you discover in this chapter, CSR affects many different aspects of operating a business — from recycling, to ethics, to environmental laws, and much more.

Ethics and office politics are powerful forces in any organization. Ethics is the framework of values that employees use to guide their behavior. You've seen the devastation that poor ethical standards can lead to — witness the string of business failures attributed to less than sterling ethics in more than a few large, seemingly upstanding businesses. Today more than ever, managers are expected to model ethical behavior, to ensure that their employees follow in their footsteps, and to purge the organization of employees who refuse to align their own standards with the standards of their employer.

At its best, office politics means the relationships that you develop with your co-workers — both up and down the chain of command — that allow you to get tasks done, stay informed about the latest goings-on in the business, and form a personal network ...