BUSINESS ETHICS

Business Ethics

Business Ethics

Introduction

Ethics is the field of study that is used to prescribe morally acceptable behaviors, and including a wide range of moral and ethical principles, providing methods and guidance for the distinguish between right and wrong. "Ethics is important for managers involved with Management Control Systems (MCS) because ethical principles can provide a useful guide for defining how employees should behave." It is important for an organization to have good ethics as unethical behaviors are costly not only to the individuals involved but also the organization, market and the society.' People learns from history,' each time a serious unethical issue arises, the government creates extra laws and standards for the governing of organizations, however these extra enforcements mechanisms "are incomplete, imperfect, and expensive, and have the typical drawbacks of rigid action controls." Business ethical issues arise because in most cases ethical actions may not generate the best outcome for an organization, "ethical individuals sometimes must make actions that are not in their own self-interest or their organizations owners' best interest." There are many dilemmas when making ethical decisions, often including the struggle between being selfish and doing 'what is right'.

A culture will define the individual and group ethics within an organization. To control unethical behaviors and to set an ethical issue free environment within an organization, senior managers will need to have well developed ethical reasoning skills, managers need moral expertise to make good ethical judgments, and serve as a role model. Employees judge their workplace to be ethical or not are solely based on what they think their upper managers do, chairman and CEO of Gallup says that "if I think my boos treats me ethically and honestly, that is what I think of the company." [G. O'Brien] It is being vital that managers have a solid foundation in ethics, if managers fail to do so they will fail to recognize ethical issue when they arise. Other ways for ethical control related to Management Control System is to have a business culture where training sessions, codes of conduct and creeds that help employees identify and think through ethical issues.

Discussion

Based on the understanding of this module and to get insight in to the practical examples I have selected an article that is related to the business ethics and related to the company of Australia known as Virgin Blue. The discussion below highlights the case and outcomes that I gained from it.

The article 'Lawyer says Virgin Blue displayed 'unhealthy work culture' in city office' by Anthony Marx was published in The Courier-Mail on 14 March 2011. The article details how Virgin Blue allegedly discriminated against two female employees by forcing them to take redundancies after confirming they were pregnant or returning from maternity leave (Marx 2011, p. 1). Subsequently, both employees have initiated legal action against Virgin Blue who 'has denied any wrongdoing and vowed to fight the claims' (Marx 2011, p. 2).

The article raises three ethical issues. Firstly, it addresses the expectation that businesses should not ...