Questioning the corporate responsibility (CR) department alignment with the business model of the company

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to question the corporate responsibility (CR) department alignment with the business model of the company to provide some insights concerning the strategic focus of the CR department, the necessity or not to align the CR department to the business model of the company, and the ability to incorporate CR into the organization as competitive advantage from a specific business model.

Design/methodology/approach

The capacity to discern some key success factors between the alignment of the CR department with the rest of the organization is done in three stages. The methodology sets the emphasis first, on the cognitive process approach of CEOs as strategists and second, on the cognitive process approach of the CR department using in both cases the Kase et al. framework. The third stage consists in crossing the results of the two first stages in a matrix where the alignment and misalignment cases are studied.

Findings

The findings show that embedding CR into the organizations is one of the most challenging issues CR faces today. The question of aligning the CR Department with the business model of the organization can be an option to elapse current obstacles in the deepening of CR.

Originality/value

This paper provides a new framework to analyze the cognitive process of the CR managers and a new matrix to study the alignment of the CR Department strategy with the rest of the organization.

Citation

Jacopin, T. and Fontrodona, J. (2009), "Questioning the corporate responsibility (CR) department alignment with the business model of the company", Corporate Governance, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 528-536. https://doi.org/10.1108/14720700910985061