How entrepreneurs deal with ethical challenges – an application of the Synergy Star technique (original) (raw)
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2007
Entrepreneurs typically live with the ever present threat of business failure arising from limited financial resources and aggressive competition in the marketplace. Under these circumstances, conflicting priorities arise and the entrepreneur is thus faced with certain dilemmas. In seeking to resolve these, entrepreneurs must often rely on their own judgment to determine ‘‘what is right’’. There is thus a need for a technique to assist them decide on a course of action when no precedent or obvious solution exists. This research paper examines how entrepreneurs experience and deal with these dilemmas. The research is based on interviews with seven entrepreneurs in established service-oriented ventures, which gave rise to 26 dilemmas. These dilemmas were analyzed by making use of the Synergy Star technique, which is introduced here as a tool that is useful in defining any dilemma, isolating the ethical component, and resolving the dilemma in a way that is congruent with the entreprene...
An investigation of ethical dilemmas and entrepreneurial behavior in established firms
2010
Ethics has increasingly been an important issue for long-term success of an entrepreneurial firm. From the entrepreneurship literature, ethical dilemmas in entrepreneurship have been explored in the early stage of firm development, but limited literature focus on how entrepreneurial firms manage through change in entrepreneurial context in their life cycle. In this paper, we applied a network theory of stakeholder management to investigate interactions between entrepreneurs and stakeholders. We identified ethical dilemmas in entrepreneurial firms at the established stage namely, fairness, responsibility toward stakeholder, honesty in negotiation, and marketing dilemmas. Four case studies of established firms in Thailand were used as an empirical study. The results show that ethical dilemmas found in the established stage are similar to the start-up stage, but complexity of ethical dilemmas increases when firms dealing with a large number of stakeholders at the established stage.
Ethics through an entrepreneurial lens: theory and observation
Journal of Business Ethics, 2002
Recent work in the fields of ethics and entrepreneurship has raised the possibility that entrepreneurs may differ from other individuals in the moral issues they face, in their moral judgements and behaviors concerning those issues, and even in their level of cognitive moral development. While this work has been exploratory and its conclusions tentative, the findings raise two interesting questions: do entrepreneurs actually differ from non-entrepreneurs in their ethical orientations and, if so, why? We propose a model of ethical decision making for small business entrepreneurs. We suggest some ways in which the ethical framework of entrepreneurs may differ systematically from that of other business people and propose some areas for future research.
ruffin_darden, 2002
To date, economics has failed to develop a useful theory of entrepreneurship because of its inability to break out of the static equilibrium framework and the modeling of success/failure as a 0-1 variable. Entrepreneurship research also has not achieved this task due to its preoccupation with the quest for “the successful entrepreneur” and/or the successful firm. This essay calls for a new vocabulary for entrepreneurship, consisting of (1) a plural notion of the entrepreneurial process as a stream of successes and failures, wherein failure management becomes the key science of entrepreneurship; (2) an effectual notion of bringing together particular entrepreneurs and particular environments through creative action; and (3) a contingent notion of aspirations that places imagination at the center stage of economics. Together, the new vocabulary allows us to ask new questions and develop new approaches that allow entrepreneurship to tackle the central task of imagination in economics, ...
Doing the Right Entrepreneurial Thing: Ethical Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2012
Are entrepreneurs more or less ethical than other business agents? This study finds that complex and novel decision settings yield biases that render entrepreneurs to have lower ethical judgment than that of managers. Such a finding raises important questions about the moral expectations that society places on entrepreneurs.
Sustaining Value Maximization in Entrepreneurship through Ethics
Adarsh Journal of Management Research, 2008
Market pressures can drive the entrepreneurs acclimatize to unethical practices. When there is tough competition prevailing in the market, the entrepreneur finds loopholes in business ethics to bail them out of the situation. This paper focuses on sustaining value maximization through pragmatic and ethical approaches that are challenges to entrepreneurial leadership. Conformity to all moral and professional principles is ensuring the stakeholders that all decisions and actions are accordance with all applicable laws and regulations and are underpinning the organization's culture and values. Entrepreneurs normally continue to exist with the ever present danger of business failure occurring due to inadequate monetary resources and aggressive competition in the marketplace. Under these conditions, inconsistent precedence arises and the entrepreneur is thus faced with certain predicament. There is a need for understanding ethical practices by integrating them with pragmatic solutions to survive in a challenging environment. This research paper examines how entrepreneurs experience and deal with these impasses. The purpose of this paper is to guide your thinking and action toward creating and sustaining value maximization through an ethical culture. The affiliation between entrepreneurship and ethics has largely been typified as adverse. We develop a conceptual replica assimilating pragmatism with ethics to suggest that sustaining entrepreneurial leadership for value maximization demands ethical action to build legality.
Academia Letters, 2022
In his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter introduced his famous term "creative destruction" to explain why capitalism will prevail over socialism. He explains that capitalism, contrary to socialism, promotes creative destruction, constantly sweeping out old products, old enterprises, and old organization forms, replacing them with new ones. The entrepreneur, he posits, is the pivot on which everything turns, whether they operate in big firms or small ones, old companies, or startups. They are the agents of innovation and creative destruction. Their projects are the wellsprings of new jobs, higher incomes, and general economic progress. However, in releasing their creative energies, rising entrepreneurs shove older ones aside, destroying their dreams and often their fortunes. Sooner or later, most businesses will fall victim to creative destruction, sometimes damaging whole communities as well as individuals (Schumpeter, 2013; McCraw, 2007). Schumpeter further explained that capitalism also developed the seeds of its destruction-not for economic reasons, but for social ones. At its worst, capitalism can reduce all human relationships to crass calculations of personal costs and benefits. It can elevate material values over spiritual ones, despoil the environment, and exploit the foulest aspects of human nature (Schumpeter, 2013; McCraw, 2007). However, suppose capitalism can somehow be balanced, argues McGraw, with noble human purposes. In that case, it becomes the economic equivalent of the famous old adage about democracy often credited to Churchill, democracy is the worst possible system except for all the others. For despite its flaws, capitalism alone has fostered the scientific, technical, and medical innovations necessary to lift humanity out of a life that was poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Schumpeter, 2013; McCraw, 2007). As agents of creative destruction, entrepreneurs have constantly created innovations that have changed how we live and interact with organizations, companies, and society. Two ex
The Status of Ethics in the Entrepreneurial Process
International Journal of Business and Management, 2014
Operationalising the notion of ethics, along with its applications in the field of entrepreneurship, has made possible the investigation of the influence exerted by the socio-cultural, economic, and legal environment on entrepreneurs' ethical behavior while they engage in the process of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of socio-cultural, economic, and legal factors on the development of business ethics. On the other hand, we analyze the influence of the development of business ethics on the entrepreneurial process. The population of the study contained 57 Tunisian young entrepreneurs in different sectors. In order to gathering the data required for measuring the study variables a questionnaire was developed. The results of the study showed that some personal traits as well as certain socio-cultural, economic, and legal factors influence their decision during the entrepreneurial process. It has been noticed that there are significant differences between the levels of development in the ethical orientation characterizing each phase of the entrepreneurial process. These differences are related to the entrepreneur's strategy, the organizational environment, and stakeholders' strategies.
Ethics and Entrepreneurship: A Supply Side Examination
2010
This research study examines the relationship entrepreneurs have with their supply chains from the triple bottom line (TBL)—i.e., an ethical perspective. The central question posed is: “Can entrepreneurs create sustainable supply chains and at the same time meet profit objectives? To answer this question the research methodology involved analyses of cases of entrepreneurial ventures that successfully incorporated TBL in supply chain ethics. From a body of 9 cases studied, 6 were chosen as illustrative for this paper. Lessons learned include that a latent fourth “F” in the existing 3 well-known “Fs” of Entrepreneurship3has emerged. The paper discusses fusion of principal and agent in the supply chain creates organizational success. An idiographic methodology examines the phenomena of ethics in supply chain management and organizational success from examination of 6 case studies of firms with global impact
The Conflicting Drivers of Entrepreneurial Ethics
Journal of Ethics & Entrepreneurship, 2014
This paper reviews and extends the literature on entrepreneurs' ethical behavior. Building heavily on previous ethical decision making models, we argue that the nature of both the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurship context warrant additional theorizing within the ethics literature. We propose that entrepreneurs face unique and conflicting internal and external drivers of ethical behavior. While entrepreneurs' higher propensity for intuitive decision making and higher internal locus of control may lead to relatively higher ethical conduct, a need for achievement may produce the opposite result. Likewise, in the course of engaging in entrepreneurial activities, the entrepreneurs' higher accountability and concern for reputation may lead to relatively higher ethical conduct, while the increased uncertainty may countervail these pressures. us, the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurship context come together to create a unique and complex system of tensions that may or may not lead to ethical conduct. We discuss the implications of these tensions and future directions for research.