Evangelism: The Importance of Employee Loyalty
Apple’s philosophy is to create newer updated products for serving the addressing the customers’ demand, competition and the need to be relevant in the industry. The company’s business philosophy is to have control over the primary technologies for the manufactured products by updating technological features and security system. The company philosophy to follow a closed system in respect of securing their intellectual property and maintaining competition can lead to different ethical decisions of the company. This is the reason for refusing a number of projects by the company. Apple’s business philosophy of never settling with less than the optimum excellence, leads to its action of incorporating a strict supplier code of conduct that includes multiple auditing schedules for an ethical state of action. The company’s rationale behind the closed system by maintaining security for the intellectual property leads to their ethical decision of filing cases against its competitors for any form of infringement rather than collaborating for combined efforts. The organizational culture is based on the aspect of encouraging debates of ideas and a base of vision for employees. The purpose of maintaining the position of innovation led to the situation of releasing improved products every year. Although, the company is responding to each potential arising ethical issues promptly by incorporating numerous code of conducts for stakeholders and suppliers with respect to sustainability, improved security and worker condition but it is also failing due to lack of openness to collaboration and focussing on supply chain quality rather than introducing newer products. The impact of organizational culture and business philosophy led to the actions of pushing the suppliers to produce more compromising the safety standards of the factory workers.
The company Apple belongs to a very competitive industry. The company offers an extensive range of product offerings by sharing a common operating system. The software application, hardware, electronics and cloud computing industry is considered very competitive due to its realization of changing customer demands. The tech giants like Samsung, Google, Huawei and Hewlett-Packard have recognized the demand for simpler life through the application of automated technologies amongst customers. This realization of innovating products and services for addressing customers’ changing lifestyle has resulted in high competition. The high competition leads to major ethical risks in the operations, including the compromise of workers’ safety and condition for heavy and innovative product every year, compromising on the cost of raw materials for responding to the increasing competition, which often risks safety association with workers. Maintaining the competitive advantage leads to environmental concerns and ethical concerns, which includes, setting unrealistic goals for suppliers and updating products for loyal customer without a stricter plan of recycling for old Apple products.
Apple has effectively and aggressively handled the ethical issues in the past. The company have adopted actions and justifications for each ethical issues and claims by framing a timely and efficient response for the concerning bodies. Even when the company was considered responsible, it followed the path of improvement and redressal for maintaining its reputable position in the market. The previous ethical concerns of worker conditions, supplier involvement and security issues are improved by the changed traditional approach of Tim Cook, which focussed more on prioritizing supply chain management and projects rather than accessible to media and creative engineering. Directed focus more on the supply chain management leads to an effective response for the workers’ condition and sustainable supply chain. Tim Cook incorporated improvement by the right to fair and safe working environment under the Fair Labour Organization.
References:
Bloomberg.com “Apple’S Tim Cook Visits Foxconn Iphone Plant In China”. 2019. Bloomberg.Com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-29/apple-says-cook-visited-new-foxconn-plant-in-zhengzhou-china.
Apple-history.com “Apple-History.Com / Specs For Every Apple Computer, Established 1996”. 2019. Apple-History.Com. https://www.apple-history.com/
Community.seattletimes.nwsource.com “Business | Apple-Microsoft Lawsuit Fizzles To A Close — `Nothing Left’ To Fight About | Seattle Times Newspaper”. 2019. Community.Seattletimes.Nwsource.Com. https://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930602&slug=1704430
Angwin, Julia. 2019. “Apple, Google Take Heat”. WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703730804576315121174761088