Two Concepts of Managing CSR Activities - Assignment Example

Organizations need to create a differentiating factor and gain a competitive advantage against their competitors, then organizations need to adopt the broad view. Adoption of this method of conducting CSR activities will aid the organization in exploring opportunities for doing business that can not be uncovered by implementing the narrow view. Businesses do not perform alone; they have to give equal importance to external constituencies such as society and government.
By adopting the broad view organizations realize the importance of their dependence on society to gain a competitive advantage. Organizations that fail to realize the connection between business and society fail to stay longer in business and all their efforts of becoming socially responsible organizations end up in vain. Today the market is full of homogeneous businesses and marketers are experiencing difficulty in differentiating their products from the products of the competitors. Under such circumstances, the adoption of large-scale corporate social responsibility activities can help organizations differentiate themselves from their competitors.

 Question 2

Organizations that adopt a functional structure are structured in a way so that the organization is divided into different groups or departments and these departments work together to produce goods and services offered by the organization (Hitt, 2005, p.327). These departments are controlled and monitored by the head of the organization even recognized as the Chief operating officer who is responsible for making essential decisions and then conveys these decisions to the lower-level staff to operate the organization. This structure is mostly followed by those organizations that work on one product or have a small number of homogenous products.

Organizations expand and the number of goods and services they produce even increases. For example, Procter and Gambler produce various products such as beauty products and toiletries. Organizations that produce a huge number of different products can not be managed if they follow the functional structure.
This is why these organizations adopt multidivisional organizational structures. In a multidivisional organizational structure, an organization is divided into different divisions according to products and these divisions are responsible for producing different products while they coordinate their activities with the supporting departments (Hitt, 2005, p.330). When products are divided into different divisions, managing becomes easier as one manager has to look after one product, this even helps in identifying how good or bad a particular product is performing and what are the reasons why certain products are performing well and others are not.