ORGANS OF THE COMPANY THAT AFFECT CORPORATE WIDER RESPONSIBILITY: A REVIEW

Abstract

Every company has two principal organs that runs and manages its affairs – the members in general meeting and the board of directors. These two organs of the company perform various roles for the company. Depending on the provisions of the country’s corporate legislation and those of the articles of association of the company concerned, the responsibility of managing the dayto- day affairs of the company is most often vested on the board. This management responsibility of the board entails, among other things, taking decisions for the company and taking necessary steps to ensure that those decisions are implemented. Many a times, the said corporate decisions and their implementations normally affect not solely the shareholders of the company but a wide range of people –usually referred to as the corporate stakeholders -such as employees of the company, its creditors, customers, local people and the environment. It therefore becomes very important that the directors should always have this very fact at the back of their minds and thus, make corporate decisions that are integrative of and would promote the interests of not their shareholders but those of these corporate nonshareholding stakeholders also. The shareholders are also enjoined to initiate and/or encourage and support such inclusive and integrative corporate approach as it is their best interests that their company is seen by the wider world as a responsive, ethical, integrative and socially responsible company The possibility of these organs of the company adopting this corporate wider stakeholders' approach and the benefits derivable therefrom, among other things, are treated in this work. This the writer does using doctrinal methodological approach. The work concludes that it is in the interest of the company that the organs of the company should be integrative of the interests of the corporate wider stakeholders in their corporate approach.