Discover Your Business Ethics IQ

Application of Ethical Principles in Business Activities

• Business ethics examines ethical principles and moral problems that can arise in a business environment.

• Business ethics applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and entire organizations.

• Business ethics has two dimensions, normative business ethics or descriptive business ethics.

• Interest in business ethics accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s, both within major corporations and academia.

• Business ethics reflects the philosophy of business, and it determines the fundamental purposes of a company.

• Ethics are the rules or standards that govern our decisions on a daily basis.

• Corporate entities are legal persons but are not entitled to all of the rights and liabilities as natural persons.

• Finance ethics is often addressed as matters of law rather than ethics.

• Neoliberalism ideology holds that unrestricted financial flows best help impoverished nations to grow, but this was contested by some ethicists.

• Human resource management deals with employment, privacy, compensation, discrimination, and workplace safety.

• Employers must provide appropriate training or hazard disclosure to ensure workplace safety.

• Ethical issues in business include rights and duties between a company and its employees, suppliers, customers, and neighbors, and its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.Overview of Business Ethics and its Various Aspects

• Business ethics is concerned with the moral principles and values that guide behavior in the business world.

• Larger economic issues such as immigration, trade policy, globalization, and trade unionism affect workplaces and have an ethical dimension, but are often beyond the purview of individual companies.

• Marketing ethics deals with the principles, values, and ideas by which marketers ought to act, including issues related to redundancy, safety, transparency, and consumer privacy.

• Intellectual property (IP) encompasses expressions of ideas, thoughts, codes, and information, and is subject to analogous protections as real property.

• Ethical and legal issues include patent infringement, copyright infringement, trademark infringement, patent and copyright misuse, submarine patents, biological patents, patent, copyright, and trademark trolling, employee raiding and monopolizing talent, bioprospecting, biopiracy, and industrial espionage, digital rights management.

• Foreign countries often use dumping as a competitive threat, selling products at prices lower than their normal value, which can lead to problems in domestic markets.

• Production deals with the duties of a company to ensure that products and production processes do not needlessly cause harm to the environment or consumers.

• Property rights involve a bundle of rights, including occupancy, use and enjoyment, and the right to sell, devise, give, or lease all or part of these rights.

• Scholars in business and management have paid much attention to the ethical issues in the different forms of relationships between organizations.

• Some studies claim that sustainable success requires a humanely treated and satisfied workforce.

• Emerging ethical issues include issues related to production, property, and intellectual property.

• Theoretical issues such as cultural relativity of ethical values receive more emphasis in the field of international business ethics.

• Business ethics is concerned with determining whether or not the business is behaving ethically or unethically, and its actions and decisions should be primarily ethical before it happens to become an ethical or even legal issue.Business Ethics: Issues, Influential Factors, Economic Systems, Law and Regulation, Implementation

• Ethical issues arise in business settings and include honesty, integrity, professional behaviors, environmental issues, harassment, and fraud.

• Dishonesty is viewed as unethical in business, and misuse of company time or resources is considered stealing from the company.

• Economic factors influence the ethics of a company and its individuals, and social media is an influential factor in ethics.

• Political economy and philosophy have ethical implications regarding the distribution of economic benefits.

• Laws are written statutes, codes, and opinions of government organizations that citizens and businesses must follow or face legal sanctions.

• Corporate policies and codes of ethics are meant to identify a company's expectations of workers and offer guidance on handling ethical problems.

• Ethics officers focus on uncovering or preventing unethical and illegal actions and assess the ethical implications of a company's activities.

• Sustainability initiatives include environmental 'green' sustainability concerns and social sustainability, such as worker's rights and human trafficking.

• Sustainability initiatives can be implemented by improving operations, board leadership, management accountability, executive compensation, and stakeholder engagement.

• Corporate ethics policies are rooted in utilitarian concerns and limit the company's legal liability or give the appearance of being a good corporate citizen.

• The effectiveness of ethics officers is unclear, and corporate culture should support ethical behavior.

• Business ethicists may trivialize the subject, offering standard answers that do not reflect the situation's complexity.Business Ethics: Best Practices, Employee Engagement, Supply Chain Management, Transparency, Academic Discipline, and Religious Views

• Best practices in business ethics include implementing sustainability initiatives and tracking relevant metrics by companies like PepsiCo, Heineken, and FIFCO.

• Employee engagement is another way to implement sustainability, and companies like General Electric and Bank of America have taken the lead in this regard.

• Supply chain management is focused on driving environmental and social expectations down the supply chain and has been implemented by companies like Starbucks, FIFCO, and Ford Motor Company.

• Transparency in decision-making data about sustainability allows companies to give away insights that can help others across the industry and beyond make more sustainable decisions, as Nike did with its "making app."

• Business ethics is an academic discipline that emerged in the 1970s, with 16 academic journals devoted to the issue of business ethics as of 2009.

• The International Business Development Institute offers a Charter in Business Development that focuses on ethical business practices and standards, directed by Harvard, MIT, and Fulbright Scholars.

• Different religious views have their own takes on business ethics, such as Sharia law, which prohibits charging interest on loans, and Christianity, which offers the Golden Rule command.

• Business ethics is related to philosophy of economics and political economy, which deal with the ethical underpinnings of business and economics, including questions about social responsibility, free will, and natural rights.