Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Managerial Values and Business Ethics: Basic Concepts
Managerial Values and Business Ethics: Basic Concepts
Basic Concepts
What is Ethics?
Related Terms: Morality: The standards that an individual or a group has about what is right and wrong or good and evil. Moral Standards: The norms about the kinds of actions believed to be morally right and wrong as well as the values placed on the kinds of objects believed to be morally good and morally bad.
What is Ethics?
The discipline that examines ones moral standards or the moral standards of a society.
The Process
Awareness Understanding Sensitization Sustenance
Why Ethics?
Accelerated rate of change Uncertainty Here and Now approach Questionable business practices
Environmental Forces
Economic Technological
Political
Governmental/Regulatory/Legal Demographic/Social
To raise capital
Myths About BE
Ethics is a personal affair; not a public or debatable matter. Business and Ethics do not mix. It is relative. Good business means good ethics.
Can BE be taught?
Teaching
Provides rationale, logic and ideas;
Helps people make sense; Provides intellectual support; Enables people to act as alarm systems;
Types of Issues
BE cover 3 basic types of issues: 1. Systemic Issues 2. Corporate Issues 3. Individual Issues
Ethics in Business
Is Ethics or Ethical Behaviour a Cause or an Effect/a Derivative? What is the relationship between Values and Ethics?
Ethics in Business
Values and Ethics in Business/Management For Holistic Competence
Holistic Competence
The Bottomline
Skills are to be necessarily applied and filtered through the medium of values. If values are contaminated, perverted then skills in application will emerge as manipulative and corruptive.
Values
Contentment Gratitude Humility Forgiveness Honesty Transparence etc. Greed Jealousy Anger Suspiciousness Vindictiveness Vanity etc.
Workplace Unethicality
Monetary Unethicality
Behavioural Unethicality
Behavioural Unethicality
Actions and decisions springing from envy, egotism, suspiciousness, competitive one-upmanship, deception and the like comprise Behavioural Unethicality.
Perpetrator-victim Dyad.
Ethical Principles/Approaches
The solution to moral problem lies simply in what you feel or understand to be right in a given situation.
It is relating to what we call the gut feeling.
People should only ask whether their actions in the market further their financial selfinterest.
If so, the actions are ethical.
Worthwhile ends justify efficient means; That means, when ends are of overriding importance or virtue, unscrupulous means may be employed to reach them.
The decision maker prays, meditates or otherwise communes with a superior force or being. They are then appraised of which actions are just and which are not.
Categorical Imperative
An action is morally right for a person in a certain situation if, and only if, the persons reason for carrying out the action is a reason that he or she would be willing to have every person act on, in any similar situation. Eg.: Firing an employee because I do not like his race. (Manuel G Velasquez, p. 79)
Categorical Imperative
Two Criteria
Universalizability: The persons reasons for acting must be reasons that everyone could act on at least in principle. Reversibility: The persons reasons for acting must be reasons that he or she would be willing to have all others use, even as a basis of how they treat him or her. (p. 79)
Consciousness Ethics
`It is an inside-out approach that engages in the task of fostering a spontaneously felt inspiration for ethical behaviour.
Purusharthas
Eternal Objectives of Life Dharma Artha Kama Moksha
I lift my hands and I shout, But no one listens. From dharma comes wealth and pleasure Why is dharma not practised? -Vyasa.
To conclude
What is right is right even if no one is doing it. What is wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it. (Unknown Source)