Realizing Ethical Issues Helps You Avoid Unethical Behaviors
In this age of change, the human society is progressing rapidly on various fields. However, the ethical problems are becoming increasingly severe. According to the teaching notes of “In It To Win: The Jack Abramoff Story,” “During the Bush Administration, Abramoff was the most influential lobbyist in Washington, D.C. His excesses led to his downfall and that of Congress members with whom he was closely connected, including aides, business associates, government officials, and lawmakers.” I believe that Jack Abramoff could not realize his unethical behaviors at the time of his transgressions because he did not realize four ethical issues: overconfidence bias, framing, role morality, and self-serving bias.
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According to “In It To Win: Jack & Overconfidence Bias,” Jack Abramoff said that “I had so much success, my team and I won everything, every one of my strategies seemed to work, every one of our opponents was vanquished, and an arrogance set in.” We should admit that Jack Abramoff was successful enough to be confident, but his overconfidence made him arrogant. When his arrogance influenced him negatively, he would be prone to act some unethical behaviors.
Then, Jack Abramoff’s improper framing also prevented him from making moral decisions. According to “In It To Win: Jack & Framing,” Jack mentioned that “anything I participated in, I wanted to win,” and “if you are a good loser, you are a loser.” I believe that when Jack Abramoff did a business, he tended to consider any problems in the business as business issues but not ethical issues because he wanted to “win” in the business. He framed business situations without consistent ethical values, so he was easier to practice unethically without an understanding of
Lobbyist, hired by a corporation or a business to work for them. Getting paid to win over politicians in exchange for favors. A lobbyist’s job is to spin the truth.There are lobbyist that stray from the rules resulting in corruption. Jack Abramoff is an perfect example of a corrupt lobbyist that everybody loved. He was one of the most notorious lobbyist of our time, he was in the middle of a massive scandal, braze in corruption, and influence peddling. Abramoff became a master of showering gifts on lawmakers and congress left and right in exchange for votes on legislation and tax breaks in favor for his clients. Jack Abramoff was very well at it that he would take home millions of dollars a year. But it all came to an end in January 2006,
Corruption is an individual and institutional process where there is a gain by a public official from a briber and in return receives a service. Between the gain and the service, there is an improper connection, (Thompson p.28). The two major categories of bribery is individual and institutional corruption. Receiving personal goods for the pursuit of one’s own benefit is personal fraud. An example of individual distortion is the financial scandal involving David Durenberger. Organizational corruption involves “receiving goods that are useable primarily in the political process and are necessary for doing a job or are essential by-products of doing it,” (Thompson p.30). An instance of institutional fraud is the Keating Five case. There are also times where there is a mixture of both individual and organizational corruption in a scandal. An example of this diverse combination is James C. Wright Jr. actions while he was the Speaker of the House.
“Most people in the U.S. want to do the right thing, and they want others to do the right thing. Thus, reputation and trust are important to pretty much everyone individuals and organizations. However, individuals do have different values, attributes, and priorities that guide their decisions and behavior. Taken to an extreme, almost any personal value, attribute, or priority can “cause” an ethical breach (e.g. risk taking, love of money or sta...
There are unethical leaders from almost every professional, industry, or any type of business. Corporate executives like Kenneth Lay and Martha Stewart were taken before the court for poor ethical practices. Leaders of pharmaceutical companies have been found knowing about distribution of unsafe products. Leaders at Coke Cola were found guilty of racial discrimination and leaders of cruise ships fined for dumping waste in the ocean. News reports exposed Wall Street analysts who created phony reports, made profits, and pushing worthless stocks, left citizens questioning if they should invest their money. Leaders of the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, were cited for practices of employee abuses and gender discrimination. Questions emerged in the news whether leaders of the tobacco i...
Strong internal rivalry between the after-merged Boeing and McDonnell Douglas Corp is also contributing to company’s ethical scandals. As competition between each party gets stiffer, employees might tend to resort to ethical breaches to gain competitive advantages so as to outshine each other.
Many organizations have been destroyed or heavily damaged financially and took a hit in terms of reputation, for example, Enron. The word Ethics is derived from a Greek word called Ethos, meaning “The character or values particular to a specific person, people, culture or movement” (The American Heritage Dictionary, 2007, p. 295). Ethics has always played and will continue to play a huge role within the corporate world. Ethics is one of the important topics that are debated at lengths without reaching a conclusion, since there isn’t a right or wrong answer. It’s basically depends on how each individual perceives a particular situation. Over the past few years we have seen very poor unethical business practices by companies like Enron, which has affected many stakeholders. Poor unethical practices affect the society in many ways; employees lose their job, investors lose their money, and the country’s economy gets affected. This leads to people start losing confidence in the economy and the organizations that are being run by the so-called “educated” top executives that had one goal in their minds, personal gain. When Enron entered the scene in the mid-1980s, it was little more than a stodgy energy distribution system. Ten years later, it was a multi-billion dollar corporation, considered the poster child of the “new economy” for its willingness to use technology and the Internet in managing energy. Fifteen years later, the company is filing for bankruptcy on the heels of a massive financial collapse, likely the largest in corporate America’s history. As this paper is being written, the scope of Enron collapse is still being researched, poked and prodded. It will take years to determine what, exactly; the impact of the demise of this energy giant will be both on the industry and the
middle of paper ... ... They had complete disregard for ethical standards that they should have looked towards when making their decisions. They allowed greed, and notoriety, to take over their basic perceptions of what is right, and what is wrong. So in conclusion, I have provided my analysis of ethical behavior that surrounded the financial events of Bernie Madoff, and the events that surrounded Enron.
After news of the scandal of Enron, one of the hottest items on e-Bay was a 64-page copy of Enron’s corporate code of ethics. One seller/former employee proclaimed it had “never been opened.” In the forward Kenneth L. Lay, CEO of Enron stated, “We want to be proud of Enron and to know that it enjoys a reputation for fairness and honesty and that it is respected (Enron 2).” For a company with such an extensive code of ethics and a CEO who seemed to want the company to be respected for that, there are still so many unanswered questions of what exactly went wrong. I believe that simply having a solid and thorough code of ethics alone does not prevent a company from acting unethically when given the right opportunity.
I discovered how sticking to one’s morals should be the topmost priority for everyone involved in business, whether personal or professional. Regardless of what the consequences may be, the intensity of the problem, and the complexities it may bring, sacrificing one’s integrity should never be an option, as integrity goes hand-in-hand with the morals of an individual (Duggan & Woodhouse, 2011). They further go on to say that having individuals take part in building a code of ethics that supports employee integrity, they will act ethically. Also, I believe that companies should place more emphasis on the moral behavior of their employees, and clear-cut policies should be set regarding such ethical situations. Furthermore, I realized how serving justice while making decisions really helps in the long run, and that opting to go for the ideal rather than they deserved is not always the best option, and could hurt a company in more than one
Based on what you read in this chapter, summarize in one page or less how you would explain Enron’s ethical meltdown.
Turrow, Scott (1985) What’s Wrong with Bribery in Journal of Business Ethics, D. Reidel Publishing Company (Boston), pp. 249-251.
An integrative model for understanding and managing ethical behavior in business organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 9(3), 233-242. Doi: 10.1007/BF00382649
The main ethical issue with the Enron scandal is that Enron allowed legal loopholes to supersede ethical principles (Bowen & Heath, 2005). Enron used legal principles to justify what they were doing instead of acknowledging that the accounting processes they were using were unethical. Another one of the ethical issues is that Enron faced was that
Treviño, L. K., & Nelson, K. A. (2007). Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right Fourth ed., Retrieved on July 30, 2010 from www.ecampus.phoenix.edu
Albert Carr argues that business is a game and that business ethics differs from private life ethics that individuals practice. Carr explains that practices such as bluffing and not telling the whole truth are morally acceptable in business context. Carr claims that one cannot apply a single standard of ethics universally as situations differ from one to another. My response to such claim is that I refuse to accept that businesses cannot be strictly ethical.