Chapter 1 - Business Ethics Overview (original) (raw)

Ethical Leadership and Building Trust—Raising the Bar for Business

Journal of Academic Ethics, 2007

Building high trust organizations (Pfeffer 1998) and honoring the ethical duties owed to stakeholders (Donaldson and Dunfee 1999) have become major topics in the management literature over the past decade as scholars and business practitioners have recognized the importance of integrating values and results (Paine 2003). Leaders of business, government, and the non-profit sectors have been asked to reexamine their fundamental assumptions of governance in the face of society’s increased emphasis on ethical leadership (Caldwell et al. 2006). This special edition focuses on the role that business schools play in honoring the duties that these schools and their faculties owe to the stakeholders that they serve.Individuals and organizations fall short in their moral and ethical duties when they lose sight of their mission and purpose, utilize their time and resources ineffectively, or set aside the importance of long-term priorities in the face of short-term pressures (Covey 2004). Although ...

Ethics of the Leader – an Essential Condition for Business Success

2019

The mission of ethics is not only to expose the theoretical aspects of morality, but also to be a practical, real guide in guiding and improving the moral life of society. Defined over time in different ways, depending on the context or the specific field of practical applicability, ethics has been focused on the principles and standards that should govern the social relationships between individuals and organizations and have always prompted the interest of those interested in living in a better world, mindful of the needs and aspirations of others, to appreciate true human values and to promote exemplary patterns of behavior. The role of ethics is to help people and institutions decide what is best to do, what criteria to choose and what their moral motivations are in their actions. For Romanian companies confronted with the difficulties arising from the transition from one society to another, from one system of values to another, business ethics is not only a new issue but a very...

How Business School Professors Can Assist in Reducing Today´s Lack of Ethics in Business

Revista Ibero-Americana de Estratégia, 2018

This paper discusses how business school professors can assist in reducing today’s lack of ethics in business by orienting future leaders on how to behave and decide properly when confronted with the myriad ethical dilemmas of the corporate world. To accomplish this, business school professors must be able to make future leaders understand what is right and what is wrong from the ethical point of view. This requires that they engage these future leaders in philosophical discussions on ethics in business, particularly to deconstruct the misconceptions that justify today’s unethical behavior. To help them in these discussions this paper presents three explanations for today’s unethical behavior, the most important misconceptions built on five half-truths, the fundamental ethical principles, and the requisites of skilled ethical reasoning.

Implementing Ethics in Business Organizations w

In view of the scope and scale of the latest scandals, e.g. Enron's maximum breaking bankruptcy, the re-discovery of ethics in business has received an impressive boost. By now even car salesmen have written ethics, ''a Code of Conduct'', e.g. in the USA or Poland. But there is no clear aim of the role ethics obtains in organizational settings as we may show in some small cases of practical approaches to deal with ethics in organizations. We discuss how ethics is the prerequisite to conduct any business and what advantages may be realized if a clear set of ethics is followed. We will discuss three practical examples. In cases of ethics-based valuesadded management of Siemens (Germany), Boeing (U.S.) and SAP (Germany) we explain the mechanisms of ethics in management to strengthen organizational success. We emphasize the importance of clear ethics-related communication processes in organizations. We explain the use of communication theories inside organizational processes to clarify communication about such an abstract topic as ethics. Finally, we point out how a management of ethical ideas and cultural values should be designed in business enterprises.