Professional Documents
Culture Documents
OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION
LEARNING QUARTER 3
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Module in
Business Ethics
and Social Responsibility
Quarter 3
Weeks 7-8
Development Team
Writer: Eliza G. Salvador
Editor: Armi Suerte C. Manuel
Reviewers: Romeo G. Uganiza Joseph C. Salvador
Layout Artist: Eliza G. Salvador
Management Team:
Vilma D. Eda Arnel S. Bandiola
Lourdes B. Arucan Juanito V. Labao
Marlyn S. Ventura
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Philosophies, belief systems and values are the foundation of business
practices. Those were patterned to create a more balanced working environment.
With those, work place can function effectively.
In your previous lessons, you have learned how philosophies, belief systems
and Filipino value system influence business practices.
This learning material will provide you with information and activities that will
help you understand and create ways to improve some of the practices observed in
a business setting.
After going through this learning material, you are expected to:
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
1.
Pre-Assessment
Directions: Read and analyze the statements in each item and then copy the letter
of the option that best describes your judgement.
1. I. Respect for human rights is an issue in global business.
II. One of the goals of national economy is to have a more equitable distribution.
of opportunities, income and wealth
A. Both statements are correct.
B. Both statements are not correct.
C. Only statement I is correct.
D. Only statement II is correct.
2. I. In many instances, civil and political rights of the citizen have often been
curtailed in order to attract investment.
II. Your right empowers you to act, perform and think in your own personal
distinct way.
A. Both statements are correct.
B. Both statements are not correct.
C. Only statement I is correct.
D. Only statement II is correct.
3. I. Respect for human dignity is the soul of business ethics.
II. Human person has primacy over things.
A. Both statements are correct.
B. Both statements are not correct.
C. Only statement I is correct.
D. Only statement II is correct.
4. I. Preferential option for the poor is a kind of witness to human dignity.
II. To treat everyone with respect simply means to empathize with others.
A. Both statements are correct.
B. Both statements are not correct.
C. Only statement I is correct.
D. Only statement II is correct.
5. I. There should be a prioritization of the workers’ welfare over that of capital.
II. Establish a good communication with co-workers to have a good working
environment.
A. Both statements are correct
B. Both statements are not correct
C. Only statement I is correct
D. Only statement II is correct
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Lesson IMPROVING BUSINESS
1 PRACTICES IN THE WORKPLACE
3. Under what principle should business decision makers be reminded that the
Earth’s resources are not constant and therefore, being responsible in its usage is
a way of respecting the natural order of things as planned by God himself?
A. Egalitarianism B. Equality
C. Parity D. Stewardship
4. Which of the following focuses on the character of the person and the virtue he
manifests?
A. Business ethics B. Code of ethics
C. Moral values D. Virtue ethics
5. “This means in everything that we do, we must avoid doing the extremes.”
The preceding statement is a demonstration of what principle?
A. Golden mean B. Golden Rule
C. Principle of Equality D. Principle of parity
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Certain practices of both employees and employers inside the business world
exist because of traditions, policies, and beliefs. Here are some key points that
should be considered in improving these practices:
Treating all stakeholders honestly, fairly and with respect creates a great
impact on them. This makes employees feel important; thus, boosts their morale and
results to productive outputs.
Now that you already know the key points in improving business practices,
examine what philosophies/belief/value does each statement illustrate.
Example No. 1
It is safe to say that the statement above was influenced by the Socratic
method of question and answer because it constantly questions the decision makers
if their chosen answer is the best among all their choices considering the
consequences of their choice.
Example No. 2
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
The world of business is fast-paced. There are a lot of things to consider in
every company decision. Companies should welcome pieces of advice in order to
improve work environment.
Business is tricky. Yet, this makes business interesting. The world of business
evolves quickly, with little in between defining your success or your failure. When you
are involved in a business, the intensity of the constant fight to flourish can make it
hard for you to step back and take a look at the qualities that define successful
businesses.
Getting that broader perspective can help lend you values that you can then
use to improve your own work and optimize your mental process. These broad
principles are sometimes referred to as philosophies: guiding notions that give you a
lot of direction in all the different decisions that go into advancing the company or
business you may be handling.
When you enter into business, things will happen differently from expected.
Failures will always be experienced. But you will also learn. Failure can be painful.
Lots of motivational types will gloss over just how debilitating failure can be in
business, but it’s important to experience it. The key to this philosophy is to remove
the feeling of having failed from the idea of discouragement.
“Feeling discouraged is an utter waste of time. You’re far better off feeling
miserable about whatever it is that has gone wrong and wallowing in that for a little
while and then drying your eyes and continuing onwards, than ever feeling
discouraged,” says Marshall Stoneham, business blogger at 1Day2Write and Brit
Student.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
In a study conducted by Small Business Administration (SBA) that showcases
how business owners characterize their companies after 4 years, over 60% of
businesses consider themselves a “success” after closure. In contrast, about 33%
of business owners feel that their business was a failure upon closure.
Source: https://themanifest.com/business-services/resources/4-best-business-
philosophies-improve-your-company
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Surprisingly, job security, which is an individual mindset, is towards the bottom.
Being respectful of others goes a long way.
Socrates himself tells us that wisdom is the knowledge that you know nothing
Of course, you might want to perhaps temper how much Socratic wisdom you take
on board in business, but the core message is very valid. If we’ve learnt anything
from the ancients, it’s the dangers of hubris.
Asking for help doesn’t just seem like good practice either, it is absolutely the
best way to move forward. You can’t know everything and in every area of business
you should be looking for advice on how to proceed, for the best possible results.
According to Heidi Grant, “It’s virtually impossible to advance in modern
organizations without assistance from others. Cross-functional teams, agile project
management techniques, matrix or hierarchy-minimizing structures, and increasingly
collaborative office cultures require you to constantly push for the cooperation and
support of your managers, peers, and employees. Your performance, development,
and career progression depend more than ever on seeking out the advice, referrals,
and resources you need.”
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
important that you develop a bit of a radar, or a filter, for intercepting information that
will be of no use to you. Having just explained why you should ask for advice often; it
seems that this is a contradictory philosophy. Tuning out is healthy.
You can’t be too affected by what people around you are doing or saying.
There has to be a point when you confidently tune out the jarring opinions of others
and rely on your own knowledge and trust yourself to make the right choice. If you
spent your whole time listening to all the noise around you, you’d never progress at
all.
Given this value, almost always top management is forced to take the
convenient method of slashing expenses by reducing manpower. And to make the
move more honorable and palatable to labor, they usually give this practice some
kind of euphemisms like “rightsizing,” “reengineering,” “downsizing” or “early
retirement” otherwise known as complicated cases of the prioritization of capital over
labor.
While the aim to improve profit is a valid concern, it has become a common
practice among managers to adopt the knee-jerk attitude of hitting first the labor
group, it being the single biggest expense in the operating budget of most
companies. This may be accomplished in a rather artful manner by employing
incentives to induce employees to “retire.”
It is not easy to find an ethical basis in eliminating labor when the company
finally decides to save on expense. In a situation like this, business ethics comes in
with a suggestion that the company must first exhaust all other alternatives,
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
opportunities of which normally abound if companies would just exert enough efforts
to seek and find those alternatives.
Only when the business organization finds itself in this kind of dilemma will it be
morally justifiable to choose to terminate or layoff labor.
This is so if the company sincerely seeks to know and adhere to what is ethical
in corporate decision-making and if it believes in the primacy of labor over capital in
the order of human values.
It is the role of ethics to convince the business sector of the truth that capital, in
the strictest sense, is only a collection of things. That the human person has
primacy over things, which can be translated into a conviction of the prioritization of
the worker’s welfare over that of capital.
The respect for human dignity is the soul of business ethics. Who is the
human person? The Greek philosophers of old have defined human person as the
social being or the political animal, the beast that is capable of the worst or the angel
clothed with the flesh. For the penetrating mind of scholastic, although inadequately,
man is reckoned as the rational animal or thinking being.
Some modern authors meanwhile call the human person in a dynamic sense,
un etre de culture - “a being of culture.” For the feminist groups, “men are merely
considered as specimens walking around.” Lady Passfield once said, playing with
the term homo sapiens as the male species, that men are “disposable variables in
social surveys.”
Still for others, the human person is the subject of both rights and obligations.
And at last in the age of computers with artificial intelligence –when laptops,
cyberspace, sky cables, CDs, satellites, electric cars and modems are as common
as radios and televisions—the cyborg or roboman, and the half-man-and-half-
machine version of the human person has become the fad.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
The consideration of human dignity when doing business is significant,
depending on what philosophy of life dictates those who do business. As expected,
this consideration would be last in many entrepreneur’s priority.
From birth, your right is an essential part of your personality; hence, the word
birthright. Thus, human dignity is a birthright. Human dignity cannot be bought, sold,
transferred or exchanged for another value. Like human dignity, human rights are
priceless.
1. Your right is always another person’s duty. Rights are naturally connected
with duties. A right simultaneously requires others to respect the activities or
interest of the bearer of that right. In this sense, your rights can impose
requirements or prohibitions on another.
2. Your basic right can provide a ground for justifying our actions and decisions.
If you have an entitlement for something it means you have a definite moral
justification to possess and claim it. On the other hand, if you have a claim
or entitlement of something, then others have no reason to interfere with you.
3. Your right can invoke the protection and assistance of others when you
exercise other fundamental rights. Others have the duty to protect you when
you claim or exercise your rights. At the same time, others are justified
when they obstruct anybody who would try to stop you from exercising your
rights.
Yes, the respect for human rights is an issue in global business; in fact, it’s an
unavoidable one. Globalization and the free world market, that is, the current
consolidation of the world into one big market economy through the removal of all
barriers to the flow of goods, services and capital, are creating many problems for
democratic institutions. These pressures are often suppressed, often by hook or by
crook.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Globalization is affecting the socio-economic rights and the capacity of labor
unions to pursue their role in achieving social and economic justice. In many
instances, civil and political rights of the citizens have often been curtailed in order to
attract investment.
Then justice must enter the picture. It desires that a wide variety of actors in
the governments, unions, business and NGOs should make attempts to ensure that
globalization doesn’t occur at the expense of human rights. Ethics insists that the
promotion of trade should go hand in hand with the promotion of human rights, and
the furtherance of both trade and human rights could be the equal and
complementary pillars of business policy-making.
When you say you have the moral right to private property, also known as the
property right, it means that you have an exclusive claim of control over something.
Your property right is your privilege. In fact, your property right is your natural
prerogative to claim for something of value.
Your moral right to private property is also a civil right, which is the ultimate
basis of capital and capitalization in business.
The prerogative to freely dispose of your properties, I.e. to use, consume, sell,
donate or bequest it;
The exclusive claim to the fruits produced by your properties, whether they are
natural or industrial;
The right to exclude other from acting upon your properties; and
Business ethics maintains that private property does not constitute for anyone
and absolute and unconditional right. Since private property has a social character
with corresponding social obligations, it goes without saying that you simply do not
have an unconditional right over your possession, stocks and wares—and no one
has. In other words, the rich have no right to get richer while the poor get poorer.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
a sustained increase in the amount of goods and services produced by the
nation for the benefit of the people;
and an expanding productivity as the key to raising the quality of life for all,
especially the under privileged- 1987 Philippine Constitution, Art. 12 sec. 1.
In general, the preferential option for the poor consists of the following features:
4. Finally, preferential option for the poor is a kind of witness to human dignity.
When you opt for the poor, you gladly affirm that the homo sapiens is worth
for what he or she is than of for what he or she has and that “being” is more
important than “having”. This principle can finally demonstrate the truth that
human dignity cannot be destroyed whatever the situation of poverty,
rejection or powerlessness to which the poor has been reduced.
More than what the law requires, ethics encourages business to scrutinize the
face of God in the manifold faces of the poor, of those who have less and those who
suffer, but opting for them. The preferential option for the poor cannot but embrace
the immense multitude of the hungry, the needy, the homeless, those without
medical care, and above all, those without hope of a better future.
With these facts and realization, in 1970, fifty leading corporations responded
to the call of preferential option for the poor and interpreted social responsibility by
actually organizing common foundation, herewith referred to as the Philippine
Business for Social Progress or PBSP. Corporate contribution is now channeled
through this common foundation and it is also where some development programs
are designed. The PBSP runs like a conspiracy in favor of social development.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
t
Directions: Read the following business practices. Think of ways to improve each
statement by revising it into a good business practice.
1. Not evaluating the performance of all employees of the unit, using established
performance management guidelines
Revised:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
2. Stagnant professional development of the employees
Revised:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
6. Unclear goals
Revised:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
7. No specific job description for the employees
Revised:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
8. Managers still involved in small decision making that should be done by his
subordinates
Revised:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
DIRECTION: Read the given article then answer the questions that follow. Use the
guide below as your reference as to how to accomplish the template.
SITUATION:
At the start of the year 2020, the world was greeted by several problems that
endangered a lot of people. One of which was the spread of the Corona Virus
Disease or CoViD-19 that later on became a pandemic threatening the lives of
human beings. As a precautionary measure advised by the World Health
Organization, ABC Corporation, a brewing company based in the Philippines,
shifted employees’ work arrangement from office work to work-from-home to
ensure safety against CoViD-19. The skeleton workforce was provided with a
shuttle bus to ferry employees from workplace to their homes and vice versa.
Recently, the said corporation also converted one of its factories into making
disinfectant alcohol because of the low stock of disinfecting alcohol at hospitals
and also at homes. Said corporation also intends to donate the produced
disinfecting alcohol to hospitals and communities under quarantine. ABC
Corporation’s subsidiary XYZ Pharmaceuticals also converted one of their facilities
into CoViD-19 testing laboratory for their 50,000 employees.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
RATING DESCRIPTION
Response rephrases the questions while declaring the writer’s main
10 idea or opinion; shares at least 3 clear examples and evidence to
support his/her idea.
Response declares writer’s main idea or opinion; shares 1 or 2
7
examples and evidence to support his or her idea
Writer’s main idea or opinion is not clear and shares no evidence or
3
examples to support his or her idea.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
PERFORMANCE TASK: GRASP (PRODUCTS)
PERFORMANCE STANDARD:
The learner shall be able generate ways to improve business practices guided
by the philosophies, belief system or Filipino values
SITUATION:
The Executive President of Santiago Manufacturing company where you are
working as HRD Specialist noticed that some of the employees are very particular in
their positions and are now forgetting ethical standards in proper treatment of their
fellow employees. To solve this problem, the EP asked you to prepare a presentation
that will be shown during his quarterly meeting with all the employees. The topic will
be: Building good relationship with fellow employees.
GOAL:
Your task is to prepare a presentation on the topic: Building good relationship
with fellow employees.
ROLE:
HRD Specialist
PRODUCT:
Presentation
AUDIENCE:
Executive President and fellow employees
STANDARDS:
Your work will be judged by the performance task analytic rubric
(Recommendation Rubric).
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Rubric for Scoring
Total
Category Scoring Criteria Points Score
The type of presentation is appropriate for the 5
Organization topic and audience.
(15 points)
Information is presented in a logical sequence. 5
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Direction: TRUE or FALSE. Read the statements carefully, answer BUSINESS if
the statement is true and ETHICS if the statement is false. Use a separate sheet of
paper for your answers.
1. The preferential option of the poor made way in the creation of Philippine
Business for Social Progress.
3. Always consider the human capital over anything else in the business.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
Answer Key
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
References:
Martin, Daryll. “4 Common Practices That Benefit Your Business” retrieved from
https://themanifest.com/business-services/resources/4-best-business-
philosophies-improve-your-companyLearning Outcomes on March 29, 2021
Maximiniano, Jose Mario B. Global Business Ethics For Filipinos in the New
Millennium. Anvil Publishing Inc., 2001
Racelis, Aliza. Business Ethics and Social Responsibility. Firsted. Quezon city: Rex
Printing Company Inc., 2017.
Roa, Floriano C. Business Ethics and Social Responsibility. Manila: Rex Book Store,
2007.
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WBLS-OBE MELC-Aligned Self-Learning Module Business Ethics SHS
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