Most ethical issues concerning a business will become visible through stakeholder concerns about an event, activity, or the results of a business decision. The mass media, special interest groups, and individuals, through the use of blogs, podcasts, and other individual-generated media, often generate discussion about the ethical nature of a decision. Another way to determine if a specific behavior or situation has an ethical component is to ask other individuals in the business how they feel about it and whether they view it as ethically challenging. Trade associations and business self-regulatory groups such as the Better Business Bureau often provide direction for companies in defining ethical issues. Finally, it is important to determine whether the organization adopted specific policies on the activity. An activity approved by most members of an organization, if it is also customary in the industry, is probably ethical. An issue, activity, or situation that can withstand open discussion between many stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization, probably does not pose ethical problems.
However, over time, problems can become ethical issues as a result of changing societal values. For example, today big data and marketing analytics are becoming new ethical issues as they can reduce employees and consumers to quantitative measurements. Many employers are beginning to use digital dashboards to treat employees like any other organizational asset, using measurements and predictability to determine deviations from the norm so that managers can know which issues need to be addressed. While this has profound implications for understanding employee behavior and how it impacts firm success, some critics believe it is unacceptable to replace humans with a computer in personnel decisions. Some also point out that human behavior can be complex and there could be patterns that cannot be accounted for using a digital dashboard. Assessing employee integrity and ability to make ethical decisions is an area that is hard to quantify. Additionally, cybersecurity is a major concern today. Hacker attacks against Sony, Target, Home Depot, and JP Morgan highlight the responsibility businesses have to protect consumer and employee personal information by deploying resources to prevent these attacks.
Once stakeholders trigger ethical issue awareness and individuals openly discuss it and ask for guidance and the opinions of others, one enters the ethical decision making process, which we examine in Chapter 5.
Chapter Review
3-5aSummary
Stakeholders’ concerns largely determine whether business actions and decisions are perceived as ethical or unethical. When government, communities, and society become involved, what was merely an ethical issue can quickly become a legal one. Shareholders can unwittingly complicate the ethical conduct of business by demanding managers make decisions to boost short-term earnings, thus maintaining or increasing the value of their stock.
A first step toward understanding business ethics is to develop ethical issue awareness, that is, to learn to identify which stakeholder issues contain an ethical component. Characteristics of the job, the corporate or local culture, and the society in which one does business can all create ethical issues. Recognizing an ethical issue is essential to understanding business ethics and therefore to create an effective ethics and compliance program that minimizes unethical behavior. Businesspeople must understand the universal moral constants of honesty, fairness, and integrity. Without embracing these concepts, running a business becomes difficult.
Fairness is the quality of being just, equitable, and impartial and overlaps with concepts of justice, equity, and equality. The three fundamental elements that motivate people to be fair are equality, reciprocity, and optimization. Equality relates to how wealth is distributed between employees within a company, country, or globally; reciprocity relates to the return of favors approximately equal in value; and integrity refers to a person’s character and is made up of two basic parts, a formal relation one has to oneself and a person’s set of terminal, or enduring, values from which he or she does not deviate.
An ethical issue is a problem, situation, or opportunity that requires an individual, group, or organization to choose among several actions that must be evaluated as right or wrong, ethical or unethical. By contrast, an ethical dilemma has no right or ethical solution.
The misuse of company time and resources—especially computer resources—has become a major ethical issue. Abusive or intimidating behavior includes physical threats, false accusations, being annoying, profanity, insults, yelling, harshness, ignoring someone, and unreasonableness. Bribery is the practice of offering something (usually money) in order to gain an illicit advantage. A conflict of interest occurs when individuals must choose whether to advance their own interests, those of the organization, or some other group. Corporate intelligence is the collection and analysis of information on markets, technologies, customers, and competitors, as well as on socioeconomic and external political trends. The tools of corporate intelligence are many. Corporate intelligence can be a legitimate business activity but becomes unethical if deception is used to steal another firm’s trade secrets.
Another ethical/legal issue is discrimination, which is illegal in the United States when it occurs on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, public-assistance status, disability, age, national origin, or veteran status. Additionally, discrimination on the basis of political opinions or affiliation with a union is defined as harassment. Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. To build workforces that reflect their customer base, many companies initiated affirmative action programs. In general, fraud is any purposeful communication that deceives, manipulates, or conceals facts in order to create a false impression. There are several types of fraud: accounting, marketing, and consumer.
An insider is any officer, director, or owner of 10 percent or more of a class of a company’s securities. There are two types of insider trading: legal and illegal. Intellectual property rights involve the legal protection of intellectual property such as music, books, and movies. Consumer advocates continue to warn consumers about new threats to their privacy.
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