In: Operations Management
What are the duties and obligations of a corporate officer in general and have the IBM CEOs conformed to those duties and obligations in terms of the geographic staffing of their employees?
A corporate officer is responsible for smooth functioning of the corporate governance and facilitating decision making in the best interest of the company’s business and shareholders. Monitoring of the implementation of the business strategy along with the compliance with the company regulators is another responsibility of a corporate officer. Maintaining, standard ethics, morals and values among the board members and the company as a whole is critical for a corporate identity, A corporate officer is required to ensure that his or her company meets the required ethical standards. The range of decisions taken by board members includes declaring dividends, fixing employee compensations, raising funds, etc.; in all these decisions, a corporate officer must actively contribute his or her expertise.
A CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of a company bridges the board of a company and the operating organization. A CEO has the responsibility to comply with the ethical standards and values fixed by the board. A corporate officer must interact with the CEOs to ensure that the obligations of the board are met by the operating organization working under the leadership of CEO.
The corporate officer may monitor the recruitment; compensation and appraisal policies implemented by the CEO and recommend the necessary changes to meet the values and norms of the board. The monitoring of human resource policies includes geographical staffing too; a corporate officer may review the staffing process in each of the meaningful geographic segments of the company. Sometimes, a company cannot implement the human resource policies uniformly in all the countries it operates. In some cases, the corporate officer along with CEO must appraise the situation and report the challenges to the board for further decisions. The corporate officer may interact with the CEO to review the geographical staffing and encourage the CEO to comply with the board’s norms.