Can Companies Do Well by Doing Good?

To date, a majority of organizations have adopted CSR as a strategy. Yet, many of those CSR projects are challenged to bring the value they promised due to lack of alignment, focus and other reasons. It is often debated whether companies have a pursuable strategy to build CSR in the genies of corporate culture, or it is mostly used as a PR tool, driven by corporate headquarter, not embedded in daily operations and lacking full employee engagement. Although many studies can be found on...
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To date, a majority of organizations have adopted CSR as a strategy. Yet, many of those CSR projects are challenged to bring the value they promised due to lack of alignment, focus and other reasons. It is often debated whether companies have a pursuable strategy to build CSR in the genies of corporate culture, or it is mostly used as a PR tool, driven by corporate headquarter, not embedded in daily operations and lacking full employee engagement. Although many studies can be found on the topic of leadership and the role of leadership in development and execution of company-wide strategic initiatives such as CSR, very little work has been done to measure the influence of leadership on executing CSR strategy successfully in multi-national organizations and relatively few studies examined an organization's readiness at employee level. The purpose of the book is to address this gap and develop a framework to analyse the effectiveness of leadership in five dimensions; culture, awareness, attitude, visibility and engagement. Adopting this model, companies can measure their internal readiness for CSR, benchmark their progress over time, and eventually measure the effectiveness of leadership.