Ethics Should hospitality and tourism companies always demonstrate Essay

Ethics Should hospitality and tourism companies always demonstrate corporate social responsibility Discuss the costs and benefits of such an approach - Essay Example The area of social responsibility extends not to the society in general but it is now focused on the workers, the investors, customers, and suppliers. Corporate social responsibility or CSR is an industry in itself. Over the past decade, this has grown exponentially. The employee volunteering has now emerged as the CSR. Companies like Accenture and Whitbread term this as Corporate Citizenship (Carrington, 2005) where they take up working with the sick children and the local schools. Most of the staff gets involved in some voluntary service or donation. The tourism and hospitality companies bring about a transformation in the area they operate but all of the changes may not be desirable. They need to maintain ethics and discharge social responsibility but the question remains whether they should always demonstrate corporate social responsibility. Today ethics determine the success of an organization. Demands of the shareholders, stakeholders and investors are forcing industries to maintain a high morality in how companies conduct business. Any deviation can adversely affect the brand image, customer retention, and overall business. A certain group of investors in Europe have decided to invest only in companies who are conscious of their social responsibility. Post (2000) contends that an organization’s global corporate citizenship is shaped by internal and external factors. How a company deals with past public issues, stakeholder issues and community concerns determines the employees’ perception of the importance of citizenship matters. Many are of the opinion that since the goal of the public corporation is to maximize shareholder wealth, management should take any action necessary to achieve this goal so long as no law is violated. The rationale for ethics in business stems from the fact that when corporations collapse the society in general loses – the shareholders lose, the customers, the employees, the community, the creditors, the family