How Does Corporate and Business Ethics Effect You?
Despite rapid advancement in science and technology, we also see many of the world's conditions deteriorating rapidly. While there is evidence that dramatic efforts will be made to improve conditions by governments to provide a better, safer, and more stable world, the question we have to ask ourselves is, are these changes possible? No doubt we all have our own opinions of what humans are capable of and when we look at tackling challenges such as eradicating poverty, solving world hunger, creating a world free of crime and injustice, or achieving true peace, some feel that these problems are too broad in scope for mankind to solve and look to a higher source. Others may still have the utmost confidence in our leaders today, since they confidently assure us that we are entering into the best of times and that major obstacles to a truly better life for all people have finally been removed. Time will tell if our leaders can lead us to better conditions and times of more certainty. seeing the There is a large problem that many people are unaware of or at least fail to understand the full magnitude of. This problem is in the grasp of mankind to drastically improve and the result will alleviate much of man's problems, affecting our businesses and personal lives dramatically. The problem is business ethics. Our common understanding of business ethics is related to implementing appropriate business policies and practices with
regard to basic issues. These issues include corporate governance, discrimination, social respons- ibilities, bribery, insider trading, and fiduciary responsibilities. However, the effects of this problem run much deeper in scope. Most professionals know that there is a great need for heightened ethics in the workplace and the signs of change are everywhere. According to the Harvard Business Review, over 500 business ethics courses currently top America's campuses, and over 90% of the nation's business schools now provide some kind of training in the area of ethics. There are also more than 25 textbooks in the field and three academic journals dedicated to the topic. At least 16 business ethics research centers are now in operation and endowed chairs in business ethics have been established within several prominent business schools including Georgetown, Virginia, Minnesota, and others. Recent surveys suggest that over three-quarters of America's major corporations are actively trying to build ethics into their organizations, yet they are facing two kinds of challenges: first, is the identifying of ethical courses of action in difficult gray area situations (the kind that Harvard business school lecturer Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr. has described as, "not issues of right versus wrong, but conflicts of right versus right").
The second issue is navigating these situations towards perimeters to better establish where the right course or higher moral decision is. Without clear parameters to help establish high moral ground and better value exchange, corporations, and professional managers will continue to dismiss the enterprise of business ethics, resulting in the continued trend of the steady decline in ethical practices. Such trends are all the more disappointing in contrast to the success that ethicists in other professions experience such as Medicine and Law. These fields have experienced steady improvement in the compliance of ethics and provide real and welcome assistance to their practitioners. The question is, can this be accomplished in the business sector as a whole? The answer is undeniably yes! The results negative corporate culture has on ethical behavior and society. As stated earlier, when most people think of appropriate business policies and practices, they associate them with corporate governance, discrimination, social responsibilities, bribery, insider trading, and fiduciary responsibilities. Further, they mistakably think that if ethical practices fail to be put into action, then the consequences will only negatively affect our business culture. This could not be farther
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