Question

      TASK                                                           
1. Choose any Omani organization and write briefly about its corporate social responsibility activities or strategies.(400-500 words). If you are part of the decision making body of this organization, what type of new activity (towards social responsibility) you would like to add?            (5+5=10 Marks)

2. Compare between Omnipotent view of management and symbolic view of management.                                                                       
3. Describe workplace spirituality. Identify its characteristics of a spiritual organization and its benefits.                                                                                                                          (1+2+2=5 Marks)
4. Explain workers compensation. How to respond on workplace injuries? (2+2=4 marks)
5. Critically examine the practice of performance related pay.    
6. Identify the various background checks. Explain any one of it briefly. (1.5 + 1.5 =3 Marks

Answer 1

1)There are many organisation prevailing in Oman but for our purpose we can take Oman Air and can understand its CSR aactivities or strategies. Oman Air is a national airline of Oman based at Muscat International Airport in Seeb. Before moving on to CSR of Oman Air, we should understand what is CSR? Corporate Social Responsibility is a model that helps a company to be socially accountable to their own company, their stakeholders and to the public. By CSR, company integrates environmental and social goals into business operations. Engaging in CSR means the company is contributin positive to environment and society.

Oman Air claims on its website:

Oman Air seeks to create a strong and effective Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme that aims to work with international goals, promote and preserve Oman’s rich culture and unique heritage that has the potential to enhance the tourism experience in Oman and develop and empower the local communities of Oman. Oman Air’s CSR activities are expansive, and are working to embrace social, economic and environmental issues within various community groups.

If we focus on what they are stressing at, then it shows that Oman Air's CSR initiative synchronises with the way we defined CSR. They are focusing on embracing social and environmental issues which is the vital part of most pf CSR initiatives that company takes. To move forward, we take their key initiative one-by-one:

• Support in research and development: R&D has always been fruitful to the economy, society
• Beautification of Oman with its communities
• Community-driven heritage sites restoration
• Cultural events for underprivileged children
• Clean up of Oman’s nature destinations
• Empowerment of persons with disabilities
• Development of rural waste management systems
• Building capacity of local guides
• Supporting local environmental programmes

Although they have not extensively discussed as to how they are approaching their goals but with their broad categories it is quite evident that they are on the right track.

In order to enhance these social responsibility further, one activity that should be added is to help Below Poverty Line (BPL) people. One possible action that can be taken is in terms of helping the NGO's who are involved in helping these people. NGO's with specific goal to help provide food, shelter and other basic needs are the best match for this social responsibility to be taken care of. Company can tie up with such NGO's and can perform its social responsibility. It is not necessary that this responsibility needs to be taken care through NGO's help. Company can adhere this responsibility on its own as well which will require more effort as a base needs to be setup in order to do it on a large scale.

Apart from helping BPL people, another important social responsibiity that company can take up is taking responsibility of poor children's schooling. The company should take up their school going fees (starting from a small set of children would suffice) which would contribute more talent to the country's economy and will also help in reducing hunger, illiteracy etc.

2) Omnipotent view and symbolic view of management are two different view of managers in an organisation. To begin with, Omnipotent view is the traditional view where managers have 'Virtually' unlimited power over the organisation's every aspect which means, company's function, purpose and operation. They then are also solely responsible for success and failure. In contrast to this view, Symbolic view is more subtle. In this view, managers have a limited control as they have limited effect on organisation outcome as they believe many factors are out of their reach. The quality of the organisation is determined by the quality of its managers whereas this is not the case with symbolic view as the whole control is not on managers

3) Workplace spirituality is not about getting organized practices. It is about recognizing in the context of organizational community. Organization that promotes it, their employees both have mind and spirit and are able to find meaning and purpose in their work and are also able to connect with other employees.

4) Workers' compensation: It is a monetary benefit under a publically sponsored scheme to those workers who get injured during their course of work. It is a type of insurance. Some of the measures that can be taken during injury are:

• First aid should be at the utmost importance
• Restrict secondary accident by not allowing those at the scene who are not needed
• Evaluate the loss and check whether further investigation is needed or not

5)Performance related pay (PRP) is a salary system where progress is linked to employee's performance based on a pre defined objectives. This system is majorly seen in service-based environment such as farming. It is also used to describe revenue targets often set in sales-based environments, usually to earn commission. In favour of it, we can expect that managers can use it to define goals. It will reward the best performers which it should. Also, A healthy performance based culture can be developed with its introduction

In contrast, there are disadvantages to it. Employees can be demotivated if the set goals are to hard to achieve. This process is too dependent on Managers' quality of judgement. Interms of economy, it is dangerous as employees can expect rise every year which may not be suitable every year based on economy's inflation rate

6)There are variopus background checks that an employee go through:

• Citizenship
• Credit history
• Work history- all the previous companies that an employee worked
• criminal record
• drug test

Company can add more to the list which depends on company's background. To define one, lets take work history:

Work history is generally taken up by reaching out to the previous employer that the employee worked with either through mail or through telephone. Employer generally needs informatio such as

• employer worked with this company or not?
• employer's worked projects
• was there any allegation or misbehaviour on the employee?

There is also another way where employee is asked to get a form filled up by previous employers and tell those employers to send that form through their official mails'.