Does business ethics really matters?

Business ethics

In our modern day world, with the ever increasing headlines of corporate scandals and numerous bankruptcies, ethics has become a matter of importance now more than ever. Iconic corporate and business leaders such as Bernard Madoff, former chairman of Madoff Investment Securities LLC, not so long ago, considered to be a top market maker in Wall street, (found guilty as a financial fraud and sentenced for 150 years of imprisonment and forfeiture of $17.179 billion(ref.)) and Enron's former chairman Kenneth Lay ( found guilty for accounting fraud and would have been sentenced 30 years of prison if he didn’t die 2 months before his scheduleded sentencing(ref.)) were considered to be succesuful business leaders and were praised in corporate, business worlds and discussed as role models in business school classes. As the events turned out, today they are represented as the symbols of fraudulent and unethical behaviour, they reinforce the image that business corporations and financial institutions are filled with greedy individuals with no moral whatsoever. The ironic fact is that these 2 persons are still discussed in business school classes nowadays but as the examples of highly corrupt business leaders and not as role models for future graduates. These are just two examples among many. The ever rising necessity to handle this ethical dilemma in business organisations leads us to the writing of this essay today. We are going to see what is business ethics, the rise for the necessity of ethics as applied standards in business organisations (ref.) and in what ways these standards are going to benefit business organisations and the society it affects. In other words why and how business ethics matter?

First lets see...

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...as to give the freedom and encourage employees to come forth and speak up when they find information or/evidence of an event or action that they deem to judge to be of an unethical nature. The firm should incite, in the form of bonuses or recognition, employees to come forth and bring into attention any activities or wrong doings inside the frim of an unethical nature. The way to create a sound ethical culture within a coporation is not only have a code of ethics. It is about alining everything within a company around the ethics, such as how employees are paid and promoted and most importantly how they comfortable coming forward if they have a problem and not afraid to whistle blow(). The coporate culture has to be designed in such a way that every employee from the lower level of the organisation to the most senior level is entitled to an ethical responsibility.