The Manager as an Ethical Individual

Ranjan Mitter

Ethically adequate business decisions.

Are usually based on judgements by individuals.

Saul Gellerman: Why good managers make bad ethical choices

Course of conduct being considered is judged to be within reasonable limits- not really wrong. Because it is in the corporations best interestsit is to be expected. Or anyway it will never be found out. Company will protect the person responsible because the company has benefited.

Albert. C. Carr says

Ethically motivated employee in a hostile environment: He is guilty by employment for the ethic of corporate advantage invariably silences and drives out the ethic of individual self-restraint. Almost anything that an executive does, on whatever level, to extend the range of thinking of his superior, tends to affect an ethical advance. To connect the long economic view with the socially aware outlook is the opportunity of the individual executive with a contemporary conscience.

According to Learned, Dooley, Katz

Conflict of materialism and immorality of business life with the spirituality that gives the individuals life meaning has led to compartmentalised corporate and spiritual values.

Louis William Norris says

Integrity is asserted as the chief requirement of executives. The idea that the CEO should be a man of thought + action is at odds with the contemporary image of the CEO as reorganiser, meeting goer, report reader, organization joiner etc. The fulcrum of the CEOs judgement comes at least to be a scheme of values.

Sir Adrian Cadbury says

It is essential in searching for the optimally ethical economic decision to think through who will be affected by the decision and how to weigh their interests. Actions that will not stand open scrutiny by affected parties is probably unethical. Originality of thinking of manager not the issue, but that he thinks and makes it work for him. Outcome of our choices makes us who we are.

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