INFLUENCE OF ETHICS

How ethics influence employee morale and how perceived business ethics can affect customer behaviour

Table of Contents

Introduction2

Research Statement2

Rationale and Research Questions2

Literature Review3

Employee morale and business ethics:3

Customer behaviour and business ethics:5

Methodology7

Research Method:8

Literature Search:8

Data Analysis:9

Consideration of Qualitative Research:9

Secondary Data:10

Ethical Issues10

Conclusion11

References13

How ethics influence employee morale and how perceived business ethics can affect customer behaviour

Introduction

For large stretches of the twentieth century, the notion that (social) ethics, (cultural) values, or (individual) emotions play a significant role in the way we conduct business was a marginalized sentimentality. Neoclassical economic theory and its derivatives, which dominated economic as well as politico-economic discourse, imposed a strictly rationalist conception of economic action. Still, the roots of this prevalent doctrine of the market are of relatively recent origin (Granovetter, 1985, Pp. 481-510). This paper discusses how ethics influence employee morale and how perceived business ethics can affect customer behaviour.

Research Statement

Business ethics significantly impact consumer's behaviour while purchasing goods and service, and it also impact employees' morale.

Rationale and Research Questions

How the influence of ethics on employee morale?

How perceived business ethics can affect customer behaviour?

To what extent business ethics had an impact on consumer behaviour?

Literature Review

The term ethics refers to the notion that economic processes and particularly actions in the marketplace have social and cultural foundations that yield ethical and moral questions, without which economic conduct and consumption cannot be properly understood. The following observations depict this problem from a sociological perspective.

From the onset of Western civilization, economic thought was deeply entangled with questions of politics and ethics and determined by the relatively narrow confines of the polis. In Aristotelian philosophy, which would greatly influence the subsequent career of economic theory well into the age of Enlightenment, the economy was based on the wealth of a few whose riches relied on the ownership of land and those who had to work for their subsistence. The ultimate question of such philosophical reasoning was the establishment and maintenance of a natural order of things. Possession established the status of the citizen, as only those who commanded considerable wealth could put their mind to politics. All goods served a certain utility; thus, any superfluous commodities encouraged trade, a development potentially dangerous to the status quo. The ethic of Aristotelian economy resides, then, in the uses to which possessions are put and the economic conduct, which must follow the rules of modesty and charity to maintain the natural equilibrium of things; excessive trading or lending were thus considered wrong (Sassatelli, 2007, Pp. 43-76).

Employee morale and business ethics:

David Whyte (1994) describes the relationship that many Americans have with work:

“We have been handed an accepted work world in which the things that really matter in human life have been pushed to the margins of our culture. Much of our present struggles with our organizations have to do with remembering what is essential and placing it back in the centre of our lives. We stop waiting in quiet desperation for our career rewards to get to the point where they finally make up to us for everything we have ...