One of the major issues concerning ethics and social responsibility for companies that operate in multinational environment are the relative and significant differences that exist in the value systems of various nations and cultural backgrounds, and sometime even within countries. Acceptable behavior that is expected in one country might be unacceptable in another country. As such, the managers at MKD Transportation, as they claim to exercise ethical behavior towards their employees, might include three matters that this behavior covers. These are integrity, accountability, and upright behavior (Firth, 2012). All organizations that have many employees usually specify the expected and acceptable behavior and code of conduct to their employees during the recruitment process and even after hiring. Many companies even go to an extent of summarizing the expected code of ethical conduct in job descriptions when advertising for vacant positions and even during the interview process.
A major component of workplace ethics and code of conduct is integrity that is being honest at all the times and doing the right thing at the right and in the right place. Accountability entails an individual being responsible for his or her own actions without blaming it on any other person. Accountability is regarded as the primary factor of workplace ethics and every employee has to uphold accountability in order to ensure that people are responsible for what they are doing and also to avoid deliberate and careless behaviors that may jeopardize the company’s well-being and reputation (Firth, 2012). In the case of ship’s captain, it is unclear whether he was aware that his ship was faulty and it was spilling oil into the water body, or if he honestly did not realize that the oil spill was detrimental to the environment. In this sense, regardless of whether the captain was honest or not, MKD Transportation should take action to remedy the incident and the harm to the environment through immediately initiating cleaning process (Firth, 2012).
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Failure to take responsibility on the part of the company may result in the general public thinking that the company only cares about their economic gains as opposed to being keen on environmental protection as part of social responsibility. Since the company acknowledges the costliness of initiating cleaning services, this may harm its reputation in the general public and the stakeholders may withdraw their support and investments from the company. Social responsibility ensures that a company balances its interests with those of the stakeholders to ensure that the company operates smoothly (Gottschalk, 2011). It is also the social responsibility of the company to ensure that it takes care of the environment and the ecosystem for the benefit of the community and the company itself. Therefore, the company should take responsibility of the mishap immediately in order to save the ecosystem from the dangers posed by the spill to avoid negative publicity.
MKD Transportation managers may choose to adopt three different stances. By adopting a defensive stance, implying that they will only respond in a manner that is required of the company by the law and nothing more than that, they will have to admit the mistake of not maintaining their ships that led to the oil spill. Also, if the company adopts this approach to social responsibility, it will take corrective actions to fix the ship and whatever else that will be required of them by the law and nothing more. Additionally, they will attempt to remedy the situation in a manner that will enable them to continue with their operations.
If the company’s management decides to take an obstructionist stance, they will be risking negative publicity as the public will perceive their company as refusing to take responsibility for their actions and that the entity does not care about social responsibility. In this sense, the general public will also view the organization as only caring about profit making as the most significant aspect of its existence and some may also think that an obstructive business is not ethical as they pollute the environment at their will and maybe they even exploit and mistreat their employees. Additionally, the ship’s captain may also be taken as an example of the company’s obstructionist approach of operation since he did not report the oil spill to the executives as he knew the company will have no intentions of solving the problem.
The management of MKD Transportation may choose to adopt an accommodating stance that will have a good outcome in the light of the media report. By adopting this stance, the company will exceed the legal minimum requirements in its commitment to remedy the situation and undertake social responsibility for the good of the company and the environment. A good example of this will be for the company to publicly admit that their ship had a mechanical hitch that led to the oil spill and that they are doing everything necessary to fix the mess. Also, the company’s management will go out of its way to apologize to the public for the environmental damage that the leak may have caused, and they may also choose to advocate for the importance of keeping the environment safe so that the general public and the environmental groups can realize their efforts in upholding ethics and reputation (Gottschalk, 2011).
To avoid negative publicity and all the issues that may arise, the company should have adopted a proactive action. A proactive approach would have ensured that the firm has a premediated plan and, as such, it has the capacity to initiate actions prior to the occurrence of phenomenon instead of only responding to occurrences after they have happened. By doing this, MKD Transportation will have compelled the captains to always report any incidences immediately so that the management can commence working on the problem with due diligence to avoid adverse damages to the environment.
Firms sometimes may choose to adopt pricing objectives instead of profit maximization. It is usually typical for any given company to be mostly concerned with profit maximization since higher profits translate to higher shareholder dividends, as well as more money for research and development. Prior to pricing a product, a company has to predetermine its pricing objectives, implying what the firm actually wants to accomplish with the determined prices. Demand estimation for the products or services and costs determination also affect price decisions (Gershkov and Moldovanu, 2014). To depict a consistent image, the company should select the most suitable pricing strategy and determine the policies and conditions concerning price adjustments. For instance, one company may want to obtain a larger market share, whereas another may be only focused on profit maximization. Some examples of various pricing objectives include sales-oriented objectives, profit-oriented objectives, and status quo pricing objectives.
References
Firth, L. (2012). Ethics in business . Cambridge: Independence.
Gershkov, A., & Moldovanu, B. (2014). Dynamic allocation and pricing: A mechanism design approach . Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gottschalk, P. (2011). Corporate social responsibility, governance and corporate reputation . New Jersey: World Scientific.
