Reference no: EM132434303

Accountability for Sustainability

Question 1. Discuss business and organizational accountability.

Question 2. List the factors that are influencing an increase in interest and activity in business accountability.

• Accountability is a concept in corporate governance that is the acknowledgement of responsibility by an organization for actions, decisions, products, and policies that it undertakes.

• A customer of a business expects that a product manufactured and sold by a business has been designed,tested, and produced so that it is safe to use. An investor in a business expects that the managers of thecompany are working to maximize shareholder return and to not be wasteful of corporate resources.

• The federal government expects that a business pays its taxes properly and promptly. These are all examples of the expectations that stakeholders have of businesses to act in a responsible manner.

• Rising stakeholder expectations are motivating organizations to consider the impacts of their actions in a broad, transparent, and systematic manner. Businesses are a major actor in modern society, and stakeholders expect that businesses be a positive contributor to societal well-being. Stakeholders want companies to be more than purveyors of a product or a service; they expect them to fulfill a more positive societal role.

Consumers are showing increasing concern for the environmental and societal impacts of the products and services they purchase. Many investors are starting to use a company's performance in sustainability as an indicator of business value and of management strength. A recent example of increased investor sustainability accountability expectations is when twenty-four institutional investors wrote to thirty of the world's largest stock exchanges asking that they address inadequate sustainability reporting by companies.

"Shooting the Elephant"
There are numerous examples of companies' social or environmental actions affecting consumer purchasing behavior both positively and negatively. In March 2011, Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy, the world's largest provider of web hosting and domain name registrations, posted a video of himshooting an elephant in Zimbabwe, Africa, on the Internet. The video showed the elephant being killed.