Governance, employees and CSR: Integration is the key to unlocking value

Abstract

Corporate governance has gained increasing importance in the last decade as organisations have been involved in bankruptcies and frauds alongside decreases in organisational value and jobs. Researchers have signalled a need for new perspectives and models of governance, especially one that clearly identifies and embeds employees as part of the system. This article explores the importance of human resources as a key component of the governance system. It discusses whether organisational rhetoric in relation to stakeholders and social responsibility incorporates employees and in doing so it delves into the concept of labour as a key stakeholder. The article examines publicly available reports of two resource-based firms and two finance-sector firms: Rio Tinto, Shell Australia, Westpac and ANZ Bank to explore the position of labour. It concludes that the position of labour as a stakeholder is problematic, with a divergence between espoused statements on CSR and how they are operationalised throughout the organisation. The emphasis seems to be on environmental and financial sustainability with lesser importance placed on dimensions of workplace management and accompanying employee relations approaches.Although human capital is recognised as the most important asset of any firm, and there are compelling analytical as well as policy reasons to care about how boardroom decisions affect employees, and how employees can affect corporate governance, the role of employees has mostly been treated as a labour issue and not as a central concern of corporate governance (Blair and Roe 1999). Moreover while organisations have increasingly espoused statements of social and environmental responsibility, adopted corporate social responsibility statements, and in practice reported on triple bottom line and balanced scorecard approaches, in contrast their human resource and industrial relations practices have often become unitarist and individualistic in approach.

Corporate Governance in Jordan and Boardroom Diversity: A Critical Review of Literature

“…Agency Theory, nevertheless, is imperfect in explaining how managers can treat indirect stakeholders' interests like politicians and what society expects from their companies (Nwabueze & Mileski, 2008). With its concentration on organizing, control techniques and managerial rules, agency theory left a gap in connection among governance and organization values through stakeholder involvement (Young & Thyil, 2009). This theory emphasized a control method to CG (Gillan & Starks, 1998) based on the opinion of corporate governance as a system of regulations, rules, and principles that monitor processes in the organization.…”

“…A study aimed to examine the role of board combination such as gender, age, and nationality of directors based on the level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures was carried out (Young & Thyil, 2009). The study used a content analysis technique (panel data) to examine the influence between study's variables.…”

“…The study revealed great evidence that boardroom diversity has an important role in defining the degree of CSR disclosure. The variables of board diversity consist of independent members, foreign board and woman directors, which showed a positive effect on CSR disclosure in Jordan (Young & Thyil, 2009).…”

Corporate Social Responsibility of Oil Multinational Corporations: A Focus on the Challenges of Environmental

“…It was argued by Carroll that evidences from this research was only restricted to societies where companies carry out their business activities and the society at large (Carroll, 1999). Drawing from the management field, this definition has been used by a lot of researchers (Valor, 2005) and this has brought about a great impact on the concept in itself (Gulyas, 2009;McGehee, Wattanakamolchai, Perdue and Calvert, 2009;Park and Lee, 2009;Young and Thyil, 2009). The concept has been seen and taken as an approach which companies adopt towards giving back to the society voluntarily, having in mind that they are not only obligated to their shareholders alone (Amao, 2014).…”

Introductory Chapter: The Level of Management Culture Development When Aiming for Implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility

“…In the general sense, there is a significant amount of scientific sources analyzing the solutions, but the managerial decisions in many cases are touched upon indirectly [23][24][25][26][27][28]. There are not many authors directly analyzing management solutions in relation with the management culture [7], social responsibility [29][30][31][32][33].…”