How to clarify the role ethics must play in the workplace

1. Overall benefits of ethics programs:

Donaldson and Davis, in ‘Business Ethics? Yes, But What Can it Do for the Bottom Line?’, Management Decision (Vol. 28, No.6, 1990) argue that managing ethical values in the workplace

• legitimizes managerial actions,

• strengthens the coherence and balance of the organization’s culture,

• improves trust in relationships between individuals and groups,

• supports greater consistency in standards and qualities of products,

• cultivates greater sensitivity to the impact of the enterprise’s values and messages.

2. So what’s business ethics, anyhow?

According to leading writers in the field, business ethics is

• an application of ethics to the corporate community,

• a way to determine responsibility in business dealings,

• the identification of important business and social issues, and

• a critique of business.

– Madsen and Shafritz, ‘Essentials of Business Ethics’,

– Training and Development Journal, 1990, pp. 53-60

3. The four principles.

In his best seller, The Hard Problems of Management: Gaining the Ethics Edge (Jossey-Bass, 1986), Mark Pastin, identified four principles for highly ethical organizations:

• Highly ethical organizations are at ease interacting with diverse internal and external stakeholder groups. …