Facilitating Corporate Responsibility

Today, corporations increasingly operate in a global sphere, which is beyond the regulatory power of nation states. Due to this development, the public calls for more corporate responsibility (CR) to fill the responsibility vacuum created by the globalization of economies. As a reaction, multinational enterprises have created CR departments to respond to this rather new quest. Lacking academic literature on schemes to implement CR, many companies have been struggling to apply credible and thorough strategies to increase CR. The aim of this paper is to outline a major starting point to facilitate CR. The author believes that a company's incentive system can determine the CR strategies' succession. Therefore, the research endeavor is to find which kind of corporate incentive systems work and to what degree they can foster CR. It was found that an incentive system, which facilitates CR, depends on a value-based governance structure that focuses on the positive side of human beings and must incorporate the polylingual nature of a company. Meaning that in addition to economic incentives, a corporation must also incentivize moral behavior by non-monetary so-called moral incentives.