The global citizen has interests not on what the firm would do with their profits but on how they make profits. Firms' economic power is bigger and bigger and they exercise their power on various areas. The cause of corporate scandals is that firm's i...
The global citizen has interests not on what the firm would do with their profits but on how they make profits. Firms' economic power is bigger and bigger and they exercise their power on various areas. The cause of corporate scandals is that firm's insensitivity to moral. Thus this study has highlighted the importance of business ethics. What the society expects to firms is not only economic responsibility. Firms have to strategically adapt to new business environments. Firms must try to change. However, the brutal fact is that more than 70% of all changes initiative fails. The cause of the failure to change is mangers' incompetence. They lose the core of the change. In order to make the change successful, managers have to understand the attribute and the process of the change.
If we look into newspapers and press media, we can find that the society have great interests in ethical issues. Because of their diversification policy, Korean conglomerates become an issue of criticism. Also, benefit sharing is a sensitive matter. These are all about ethical issues. In older to survive in the new managerial environment, firms have to practice strategically ethical management. As we saw with corporate scandal examples, markets reaction to unethical firms is so brutal.
To implement ethical management, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is emphasized as a heart of management strategy. CSR is not a completely new concept and every firm has his own method to engage in it. One of the most important concepts of CSR is the idea that it reflects both the social obligations and the social consequences of business success.
As the social interest on CSR has increased since previous two decades, there are so many definitions and implications about CSR. In spite of the climate, the concept of CSR is still ambiguous. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to make clear who the target of CSR is. For whom firms have responsibility? The answer can be stakeholders. If firms engage in managing the stakeholder, they can establish ethical management. With this strategy, firms can achieve a long term development. Firms can gain a toehold for sustainable growth with management for stakeholder.
Firm's value is created by production and management activity in various stakeholder groups. Therefore, firm's value takes account for the sum of stakeholder's value and shareholder's value. To encourage stakeholder's firm specific investment, firms need to strengthen the reliable relationship with their stakeholder. If we regard firms not as a fiction but as a reality, managers have fiduciary duty not for the shareholder but for the firms. Then, who does compose a firm? It is stakeholders. Therefore, firms have to consider stakeholders as shareholders. In other words, they have to consider stakeholder's opinions by decision making process.
The idea of CSR and management for stakeholder is too broad. To overcome the shortcomings of CSR and the management for stakeholder, managers have to recognize their managerial objects more distinctively. Through power, legitimacy and urgency managers can identify stakeholders. Also with these three attributes, managers can grasp the salience of relation between the stakeholder and the manager. In the stakeholder paradigm, managers play a pivotal role. Only managers can control the relation with every stakeholder. There exists an agency problem between the stakeholder and the manger. The problem of the stakeholder agency problem occurs due to their power difference. This problem can be dissolved by identification of stakeholder's attributes and ex ante contract or regulatory instruments. Also the relation between the stakeholder and the manager is not static. If the stakeholder lose or gain additional attributes, their salience can be altered. So the relation between the stakeholder and the manager has dynamical features. When managers realize this dynamics, they can recognize the salience of the stakeholder and implement management effectively for the stakeholder with limited resources.
The Firm's financial policy implication can be drawn by the management for stakeholder. When a firm engages in management for stakeholder strategically, the firm's stakeholders are willing to increase their firm specific investment. In this situation if the firm goes insolvent, the cost is too expensive for stakeholders. Thus, the stakeholder claims that the firm should reduce leverage level. And also if the firm expects to obtain high potential benefits, it can increase the investment on intangible assets and the stakeholder make firm specific investment actively. This may have an positive effect on stock price. In other words, if firms engage in management for stakeholder effectively, they could increase their firm value.
The traditional corporate finance theory has focused on the relation between shareholders and managers. However, we have experienced many corporate scandals in the 21 century, which have negative financial influence on shareholders’ employees, suppliers, customers, financiers and local communities. The influence was too enormous. Accordingly, many researches about CSR and management stakeholder have been developed in Europe and USA. However, this area is still unexplored field in Korea.
This study has investigated the CSR and the management for stakeholder in view of ethical and corporate governance. The study tried to propose a theoretical framework of management for stakeholder practice and drawn a financial implication through management for stakeholder management. Using the financial and stock market data, the study also described the influence of leverage and intangible assets' ratio on the financial performance. Firms with low leverage and high intangible assets' ratio have experienced better financial performance. This result is main finding of the study.