Corporate Investigative Report. UBER Company report

Corporate investigative report Name Institution Date
 Corporate Investigative Report The advent of globalization brought greater competition where economies increasingly focus on innovation as a way to generate, maintain, and sustain competitive advantages (Lush).  It is expected that even as firms increase their competitiveness, they promote ethical conduct and compliance in the workplace. Auditing a company’s activities is one way to evaluate whether their corporate culture is toxic or the employees can fit in and continue promoting growth without violating professional ethics, laws, and regulations.  The corporate investigative report details the employee complaints, suspected violations, integrity concerns and audit matters at Uber in the past few years. The corporate investigative report focuses on corporate issues affecting Uber in the past years and especially corporate governance.  Like other tech startups, Uber has reshaped the transportation system by connecting passengers with drivers like taxis using mobile apps. Uber’s vision is providing transport that is accessible to a larger urban target market and creates economic opportunities.  While Uber utilizes established technology, the company has been innovative in the way it links passengers to drivers and allows the passengers to select drivers and even rate them. Even when the company was first started, there was little physical capital, but the intellectual capital partly allowed the firm to thrive. There were complaints that Uber did not undertake a prompt review of drivers even after reported cases of some committing sexual harassment and assault. The culture at the company worsened the situation as they were slow to react or make changes they focus on low prices to remain competitive (Jordan, 2017). While there are other ride-sharing companies, Uber has received negative press because of the company’s culture and even led to Travis Kalanick the founder and former CEO relinquishing his position at Uber later on. At the same time, sexual harassment among staff was dealt with even after complaints that there was a culture of sexual harassment Susan Fowler first made allegations that Uber had a toxic culture, which made it difficult to address sexual harassment and assault suspected cases in the company (Lazarro, 2017). The former company employee claimed that those who rebuffed sexual advances were held back from rising in the company. Furthermore, the human resources department did not follow the allegations made, which made it seem that the management was unbothered to deal with such issues mainly affecting the female employees.   Even when it is expected that those who have previously been accused of sexual harassment are investigated, the management still failed to look into the matter, when this would have helped to change the corporate culture at Uber Undertaking proper background checks is important to the company’s reputation as the drivers are Uber’s agents, even as they operate independently. However, Uber appears to have been lax in prioritizing such checks. This is an indicator that the corporate culture mostly focused on background checks and the failure to emphasize due diligence, partly explain the problems that have affected the company (Van Rooij & Fine, 2018). Uber has been represented as a technology company even as the company operates in the ride-sharing market. The company culture in tech-enabled companies like Uber depends on the people and technology since it is the leadership, which determines the place of ethics in the corporate culture (Rinne, 2018).Uber bills itself as an innovative company that offers job opportunities to many people, but the management ought to have focused on respecting public safety.  Similar companies, which are community-based perform and focus on peer-to-peer transactions have disrupted established markets, but adopt different corporate cultures, even as they have similar cultures (Fenwick,  Kaal & Vermeulen, 2017). Given the allegations leveled against the company’s culture, management, and its broken screening system that has failed to identify people with serious criminal offenses, the changes in the company have not been fast enough.  While internal investigations have been launched, the company has been slow to implement the recommendations, even as this would further improve the company’s reputation, brand, and quality of services.  Uber has become synonymous with cheap rides, but over the past few years, it has emerged that the company’s management has tried dodging the worker protection laws. Edelman (2015) pointed out that firms that have managed to fight regulators and different regulations in the diverse market are likely to have corporate cultures that are hostile to the law just like Uber.  Some of the recommendations to improve the corporate culture of the company have included having a more independent board, who would be responsible for changing the toxic culture (Jordan, 2017).   When more workers lose faith in the leaders’ ability to initiate and implement ...