Putting Ethics Before Business

Some people believe that ethics is of little concern to business people. Ethics is ethics and business is business. When faced with an ethical dilemma today, many upwardly managers tend to take the position that they must wear two hats and cloak themselves with two separate, conflicting codes of ethics. One is applying to the professional or technical aspects of their work and the other is for their business behavior.

This leads to the development of a schizophrenic professional personality, with the manager striving for professional excellence and high ethical standards for his own self, but resorting to unethical practices to achieve business success for his organization at all costs. Indeed this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde approach is at the heart of many ethical dilemmas in managerial decision-making.

Ethics is the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society. It asks how these standards apply to our lives and whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable that is whether they are supported by good reasons or poor ones.

Business ethics is a specialized study of moral right and wrong. It concentrates on moral standards as they apply to business policies, institutions and behavior through which modern societies produce and distribute goods and services, and to the people who work within these organizations. Business ethics in other words is a form of applied ethics. It includes not only the analysis of moral norms and moral values, but also attempts to apply the conclusions of this analysis to that assortment of institutions, technologies, transactions, activities, and pursuits that is called business.

Business is a cooperative activity whose very existence requires ethical behavior. First, any individual business will collapse if all of its managers, employees and customers come to think that it is morally permissible o steal from, lie to or break their agreements with the company. Because no business can exist entirely without ethics, the pursuit of business requires at least a minimal adherence to ethics. Second, all businesses require a stable society in which to carry on their business dealings. Yet the stability of any society requires that its members adhere to some minimal standards of ethics.

Business cannot strive without ethics; it is in the best interest of business to promote ethical behavior both among its own members as well as within its larger society. There are many difficulties involved in trying to study whether ethical companies are more profitable than unethical ones. The results have been mixed. Although, several studies have found a positive relationship between socially responsible behavior and profitability, some have found no such relationship. Other studies have looked at how socially responsible firms perform on the stock market and have concluded that ethical companies provide higher returns than other companies. Together, all these studies suggest that, by and large, ethics does not detract from profit and seems to contribute to profits. When employees believe an organization is just, they are more willing to follow the organization’s managers, do what managers say and see managers’ leadership as legitimate. In short ethics is the key component for any business.

By: Elton John

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John Elton owns and operates a Best Penny Stocks Picks website to help other investors with their stock decisions. He also operates a Home Based Business earn money online site to help entrepreneurs gain experience and wealth."