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Business ethics and social responsibility

1. Ethics and decision making

- While shaping our vision, we need to consider the ethical drivers of the people involved in the organisation

- These drivers will be illustrated and driven by their own individual views and values

- There also is the multiplicity of ethical expectation of our organisation’s internal and external stakeholders, in themselves just more people with their own differing views and values

Integrity and reputation

- Integrity sits at the heart of the ethical requirement of any human being, and in particular how we are expected to behave as professionals

- integrity – the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles

- The ethical behaviour that we portray is based upon the diversity of different inputs and forces that derive from our inherited traits, as moulded and matured through our life to this particular point in time.

objectivity – not being influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts

- a core requirement for our development of effective strategy – the ability to always review and re-review the starting point, the ‘today’ position.

- The purpose of this is to allow us to develop an objective approach which will utilise our own integrity and wisdom at that very point of strategic consideration.

reputation - ‘the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something

Our reputation and that of our organisations is only ever based upon the ethical opinions and beliefs that are held and developed by others, each with their own diverse ethical opinions and beliefs.

-Reputation could therefore be seen as the accumulation of the bias of others

The scope of business ethics (reputation) is a combination of:

individual and combined values of all of the people involved

the prevailing tone of the corporate culture

codes of conduct that might apply across differing aspects of personal and organisational behaviour

societal and internal and external stakeholder expectations

local, national and international law.

Stanwick and Stanwick-

three core questions which need to be answered to enable an organisation to make and deliver effective ethical decisions

1. the individual needs to ask, ‘Who am I?’

2. the team or group needs to ask, ‘Who are we?’

3. the organisation needs to ask, ‘Who is the company?’

Constance Bagley

The Decision Tree

DIMENSIONS OF ETHICS

Chryssides and Kaler

the same two core dimensions of ethical behaviour that affect each individual – principles and situation – will also strongly influence the evolution of ethical norms within a business

five different views of business ethics

1. Business is business: the aims of an organisation are purely commercial and therefore the maximisation of the perceived expectations will outweigh any ethical dimension

2. Act consistently within the law: it is accepted that the law is there to protect the greater good of all concerned and therefore should underpin ethical decision-making

3. Good ethics mean good business: this is sometimes known as the coincidence theory and there has been significant research to suggest that organisational sustainability is closely aligned with the perception by stakeholders of good business ethics.

4. Conventional morality: the business will operate in line with the prevailing moral codes of the society within which it is based

5. Universal morality: people in the business world should maintain the same standards of ethical behaviour in business as they would in their private lives.

important point for the strategist

- any business is only ever a collection of individuals

- It is those people who will need to implement the strategy and achieve the objectives

- they will expect you to develop strategies to align with their ethical beliefs and enable the strategic objectives to be achieved within the constraints of those same ethical dimensions