Corporate Social Responsibility as a Source of Competitive Advantage

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) means that a corporation should be held accountable for any of its actions that affect people, their communities and their environment; it may require a company to forgo some profits if its social impacts are seriously harmful to the corporation’s stakeholders or if its funds can be used to promote a positive social good. Tougher competition recently has compelled the firms to adopt something that is different from their rivals and has also put a pressure on the firms to examine their philanthropy and other social activities, by doing so the company can sometimes achieve a strategic advantage over its competitors. There is a business case for CSR but it is much less important or influential than many proponents of civil regulation believe, CSR is best understood as a niche rather than a generic strategy: it makes business sense for some firms in some areas in Continue reading

Emotional Quotient (EQ) Vs. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) – Which One Is More Important?

Intelligence is a term that is difficult to define, and it can mean many different things to different people. Intelligence is often defined as the general mental ability to learn and apply knowledge to manipulate your environment, as well as the ability to reason and have abstract thought. In education, Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or challenging situations. In psychology, it is the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria; for example IQ test. It is thought from deriving a combination of inherited characteristics and environmental such as developmental and social factors. General intelligence is often said to comprise various specific abilities like verbal ability, ability to apply logic in solving problems. There are two types of intelligence quotients: emotional and intelligence quotient. Emotional intelligence or emotional quotient (EQ) is Continue reading

Business Strategy Games

The Business Strategy Game is a hands on learning exercise that will give managers valuable decision-making practice and develop powers of business judgment.   Business strategy games involving management process before confirming the decision to be made. Lesson learned taken from the business game, from the process and the content from the case (industry and situation & condition of the business) is used for decision making. Various processes involved in business strategy games are; Management Process Planning was the first process taken. Reading and understanding the relevant information was necessary and plays a significant role in planning process. Expectation was established in the planning, and followed stepping process until all aspects have been determined, including all distinctiveness in production (capacity, model, etc.), transportation (shipping), labor, etc. Planning is critical, and it was indicated in the business strategy games, in which it required quite some time to achieve an agreement. Time Continue reading

Knowledge-Sharing Dilemmas in Organizations

Information being exchanged amongst the workers of an organisation is a system that has been an essential constituent of the procedure of knowledge management. With the introduction of the contemporary information and communications technology within corporations, it has become very convenient and has also become a valuable support function to make such exchanges possible by reducing the obstructions of time and distance. On the other hand, those corporations that have invested in technologies of this kind are frequently faced with the complications of inducing the workers to utilize the purpose of those technologies in order to communicate their knowledge and perceptions. The knowledge share/hoard predicament is a socio-psychological behavior aspect that describes that employees feel the need to not share information or organisational knowledge that they posses because it may eventually harm their own status within the organisation or by sharing knowledge may therefore provide a competitive advantage to their Continue reading

Improving Quality of Work Life

Quality of work life improvement refers to any activity for greater organizational effectiveness through the enhancement of human dignity and growth process through which the work force of the organization learn how to work together for betterment to determine for themselves what actions, changes and improvements are desirable and workable. What work force feels about the work place? The ‘Economic Times’ in December 1999 collected the views from top level HR executives from Indian companies on the emerging workplace. The views expressed were as follows: There would be more celebrations. Music, poetry, and art at work to provide creative moments in between the lightening speed of work. People with high EQ levels would be valued far more than yesterday as coaches and facilitators orchestrate the output of knowledge workers. People tomorrow would want and deserve a workplace free from anxiety and stress, where each can contribute fully from their jobs Continue reading

The Four Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence

The four branch model of emotional intelligence proposed by  Salovey and Mayer, that identified four areas of capacities or skills  of emotional intelligence: the perception of emotion, the ability reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotion and the ability to manage emotions. According to Salovey and Mayer, the four branches of their model are, “arranged from more basic psychological processes to higher, more psychologically integrated processes. For example, the lowest level branch concerns the (relatively) simple abilities of perceiving and expressing emotion. In contrast, the highest level branch concerns the conscious, reflective regulation of emotion” (1997). Salovey and Mayer  add that abilities that “emerge relatively early in development are to the left of a given branch; later developing abilities are to the right.” They also say that, “people high in emotional intelligence are expected to progress more quickly through the abilities designated and to master more of them.” The Continue reading