The Importance Of Ethical Culture

1200 Words3 Pages

Most people spend a great deal of their time at work therefore the work milieu is enormously significant and can have significant effects on other aspects of one’s life. An environment that is ethical and based on mutual respect and treating of the employees as humans and not the means is an ideal environment. Ethical guidelines and policies at work can be very beneficial in a business environment; being ethical has a lot of benefits and is something managers with a good work ethic know well. Because they identify the helpfulness of ethical practices, they usually put an extensive amount of effort into integrating it with the organization’s culture. Ethical leaders can change the culture of the organization from the interior and “Organizations …show more content…

A culture that is building and progressing through the company has to be universal and no one can be exempted or excluded from it, otherwise it will lose its value and integrity. Thus, the culture has to be developed gradually and constantly updated with the participation of all the stakeholders within a company. Many of the companies develop their ethical practices code of conduct without participation from the stakeholder and their attempt is unrewarding due to similarity with the prisoners in the “The Allegory of the Cave” metaphor by Plato. These companies get caught in the real business world by the actualities that they have not prepared for and did not know even about their existence since they build their code of conduct based on their perception and not the reality. Also values that drive ethical behavior has to be encouraged and nurtured. Values such as Wisdom and Knowledge, Self-Control, Justice, Transcendence , Love and Kindness, Courage and Integrity (Kerns, 2003). Furthermore, the key to success in developing and maintaining the culture is constantly measuring, tracking, and enhancing organization’s practice of ethical behavior. Executives and organizations that do not make an ethical culture an enduring precedence risk long-term business complications. Ethical culture is the single major element in discouraging misconduct, and bad conduct by even a small number of employees can jeopardize a company (Ethics Resource Center,

Open Document