Who should an organization serves?

Authors Avatar

                                                                

Who should an organization serves?

All organizations exist for a purpose or a specific overall goal. But what defines their goal and who should they really serve? The shareholders? The employees? The stakeholders? The Society? Some people say the answer would be the shareholders since they are the owners of the companies. They provide the corporation the necessary funds to exist. However, by aligning the organizations’ goal with the shareholders’, problems often arise. Enron, for instance, has been charged with quite a few lawsuits because they’ve pushed themselves too hard to meet the shareholders’ goal; they were caught in 2002 by falsely boosting their earnings. On the other hand, some argue that an organization should serve the employees since they are the fundamental building blocks of the company.  Many people believe that this method would result in employees that are motivated to achieve the maximum productivity, which also helps to achieve the organizational goals. However, chances are that these organizations would often encounter with agency problems. Employees would often neglect the organizations’ interests, and incline only to maximize their own welfare. Thus, as it has shown, narrowing down and focusing the organizations’ goal on only a particular group of stakeholders would often lead the organizations to have a short-term vision, and hence doomed to failure in the long run.  

Join now!

In my opinion, organizations should be serving all groups of stakeholders – the shareholders, the employees, the customers, and the community, etc. Starbucks for example, has been successfully positioning itself as the leader in the coffee market by looking after various stakeholder groups. Their success can be seen through their proliferation of coffee shops in the recent years. It is not surprising that you are able to spot their subsidiaries, not only in North America, but also in Japan, Hong Kong, and most other parts of the world. While I was conducted a research on Starbucks for my marketing project, ...

This is a preview of the whole essay