An investigation of ethical dilemmas and entrepreneurial behavior in established firms (original) (raw)

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.