Corporate Responsibility: sustainable business

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility is mandatory to run the business ethically and create values for the social communities across the globe by providing green environmental footprint. It is the responsibility of the multinational companies to maintain its corporate social responsibility and create values for the stakeholders. Through this study, it is possible to discuss business dissertation help about corporate scandal in British Petroleum Company plc. (BP) and evaluate the company’s activities in the society. BP is the British multinational oil and Gas Company, situated in London and it is successful to run their operations across the globe. The major products petroleum, natural gas, motor fuels and aviation fuels (Racine, Wilson and Wynes, 2020). The services of the company are efficient to support the customers and provide the best quality oil and gas across the globe. Through this study, it is possible to analyse the corporate scandal and evaluates causes of failure of the brand BP. Moreover, triple bottom line will be evaluated for understanding the stakeholder’s needs and preferences as well as proposing the recommendations for BP to overcome the issues related to the corporate social responsibility.

Analysing corporate scandal and underlying causes of failure

BP has been directly involved with the environmental scandal and safety incidents. In 2005, Texas City Refinery explosion is one of the major controversies, which caused the death of 15 workers and which resulted in a record-setting OSHA fine. In 1967, there was Britain largest oil spill, the wreck of Torrey Canyon and also in 2006, there was Prudhoe Bay oil spill, the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope, which resulted in a US$25 million civil penalty (Le Coze, 2019). It has direct environmental impacts and also there are critical effects on the living beings on earth. Deep water horizon oil spill was another incident, happened in 2010, the largest accidental release of oil into marine waters in history, leaked about 4.9 million barrels of oil, and it has caused several environmental, human health and economic consequences. There are also serious legal and public relations repercussions for the organisation. 1.8 million US gallons were utilised to clean up response. There were various claims and clear water act penalties where the firm must bear the cost and arrange capital or cleaning up the water (BP, 2019).

Oil spill is hereby the main corporate scandal for which the corporate brand image of BP has been hampered. Additionally, in 2010, the damaged oil well was leaked thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and an explosion rocked the rig caused killing of 11 workers. The livelihood of the fisherman across the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi has also been hampered. OSHA found organisational and safety deficiency at all the levels of contingency planning of the organisation and there was violation of Clean Water Act. In 2009, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined BP an additional $87 million due to such incident and unethical practices in oil and gas industry. Chemical leakage and toxic instance release were the major cause of the corporate scandal of the organisation for which there were millions of penalties to cope up with the issues and protect the environment (Racine, Wilson and Wynes, 2020). BP has admitted that lack of efficiency of the multifunctioning equipment led towards releasing harmful chemicals into the air of Texas City surrounding areas and oil spill was also another major cause for which the corporate brand is suffering from the corporate social responsibility scandal, where the brand fails to maintain their sustainability standard for running the operations ethically (BP, 2020).

Discussing potential conflicts of interest and acts of unethical behaviour

The organisation BP fails to maintain the ethical standard in running their business legally and create value for the stakeholders engaged with the business. The organisational culture is not efficient to develop ethical practices and maintain quality standard of running their operations (Le Coze, 2019). Due to lack of communication and non-cooperation, the workers fail to work as a team which further deteriorated the efficiency of the staff to perform and tackle the risky situations in BP. The operational management team are also not proficient to handle the oil spill and explosion due to multifunctioning system and presence of non-technical staff in the organisation. The corporate governance is being hampered in the organisation due to lack of coronate culture and unethical practices. The Health and Safety at workplace Act 1974 is also violated by the organisation BP where the employees are working under unsafe circumstances. On the other hand, deficiencies in management, poor team work and lack of training and developmental programs to educate the employees are others major issues which led to such incidents at BP. The organisational also fails to maintain ethical standards and professionalism in the company to lead the employees with adequate knowledge and safety measures to operate in producing oil and natural gas. Crisis in communication and team working is there for which the corporate managers failed to lead the team with learning and developmental activities for working efficiently and handling the incidents critically. It also violates the guidelines of US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board which is illegal to operate internationally (BP, 2020).

Evaluating triple bottom line

Triple bottom line is effective to measure the social and environmental impacts of the organisation as well as the financial performance of the organisation. The triple bottom line refers to the three components which are people, profit and planet. For profit volume management, the company BP is successful to generate revenue and retain more business clients to purchase oil and gas from BP. There is strong customer base of BP across the international markets for their quality products and efficient services (Schwartz, 2020). Additionally, the production and manufacturing volume is also high to serve the customers efficiently, which further maximises the organisational profitability in long run. Hence, the brand is successful to maintain its economic sustainability in running their business across the globe and achieving high market share. On the other hand, people is another major factor as per the triple bottom line, where the organisation is responsible to manage their stakeholders, including the employees, customers, shareholders, operational management team members and others who are engaged with the organisational activities (Daudigeos, Roulet and Valiorgue, 2020). The employees are the major stakeholders of the company to operate efficiently and serve the client successfully. Hence, it is responsibility of the BP to manage their people and lead them towards achieving success.

The internal strategy of providing structured salary and incentives as well as giving high return on their investment is beneficial to create values for the people. On the other hand, it is mandatory to maintain health and safety at the workplace, as the corporate leader must create values for the employees and provide them suitable circumstance to work safely (Van Rooij and Fine, 2018). The oil and gas industry activities is very critical where safety management is mandatory, however, BP fails to maintains safety measures and security of the people, for which due to oil explosion, for which there were caused the death of 15 workers. As per the third component planet, the organisational responsibility is to maintain green environmental footprint and protect the natural resources of earth (Van Rooij and Fine, 2018). However, BP fails to maintain sustainability of their operations in oil and gas production, for which the incidents of Deep-water Horizon explosion and oil spill, Sea gas leak and chemical leak in Texas and toxic substance leak happened (Daudigeos, Roulet and Valiorgue, 2020). Hence, the company fails to maintain the environmental sustainability and protect planet in long run. Hereby, though the organisation is able to manage their stakeholder by providing high return on investment, BP face difficulties to maintain health and safety of the workers as well as it also fails to maintain green environmental footprint to protect planet.

Conclusion and recommendations

As per the discussion, BP fails to manage the incidents due to late response of the organisational leader and managers for which the issue of crisis of communication, lack of accountability and sustainability have been raised in the firm. It is important to tackle the situation and run the operational activities ethically, in order to maintain stakeholder’s values and create good corporate brand image by providing green environmental footprint. As per Friedman vs. Freeman, it is necessary to implement stakeholder’s perspectives of Freeman, in order to consider many stakeholders group who are engaged with the business of BP. The organisation must focus on social investment to protect the livelihood of the fisherman and other people in coastal areas by tackling the oil spill effects. Additionally, the organisational manager needs to develop good corporate governance by developing trust and corporate bonding among the stakeholders. It is essential to develop good team work with communication and cooperation, so that the employees can share knowledge and expertise with each other and work as a team efficiently. It is important for BP to handle the exploration, refining, production and distribution of oil and gas in systematic way by maintaining safety and ethical standard.

Reference List

BP, 2019. BP sustainability report 2019. [Online] Available at: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/sustainability/group-reports/bp-sustainability-report-2019.pdf [Available at 18 July 2020].

BP, 2020. BP sustainability report 2020. [Online] Available at: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/sustainability/group-reports/bp-sustainability-report-2020.pdf [Available at 18 July 2020].

Daudigeos, T., Roulet, T. and Valiorgue, B., 2020. How scandals act as catalysts of fringe stakeholders’ contentious actions against multinational corporations. Business & Society, 59(3), pp.387-418.

Le Coze, J.C., 2019. Safety as strategy: mistakes, failures and fiascos in high-risk systems. Safety science, 116, pp.259-274.

Racine, M., Wilson, C. and Wynes, M., 2020. The value of apology: How do corporate apologies moderate the stock market reaction to non-financial corporate crises?. Journal of Business Ethics, 163(3), pp.485-505.

Schwartz, M.S., 2020. Beyond petroleum or bottom line profits only? An ethical analysis of BP and the Gulf oil spill. Business and Society Review, 125(1), pp.71-88.

Van Rooij, B. and Fine, A., 2018. Toxic corporate culture: Assessing organizational processes of deviancy. Administrative Sciences, 8(3), p.23.

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