Business ethics also referred as corporate ethics or professional ethics is an applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that crop up in a business environment. Business ethics applies to all aspects of business conduct and is applicable to the conduct of individuals and entire organizations.
Business ethics hold both normative and descriptive dimensions. As a corporate practice and a career specialization, the field is standardized. Academicians wanting to learn business behavior employ descriptive methods. This range and quantity of business ethical issues shows the interaction of profit-maximizing behavior with non-economic concerns.
Business ethics involves the study of proper business policies and practices with reference to potentially controversial issues, like corporate governance, insider trading, bribery, discrimination, corporate social responsibility and fiduciary responsibilities. The primary aim of implementing Business ethics in order is to ensure that a certain required level of trust exists between consumers and various forms of market participants within the businesses. For instance, a portfolio manager must give the same consideration to the portfolios of family members and small individual investor. Such practices ensure that the public is treated fairly.
The concept of business ethics mean various things to various people, but to know what it right or wrong in the workplace and thereby doing what’s right – With reference to effects of products/services and in relationships with stakeholders. Since there is no clear moral measure to guide leaders through complex dilemmas about what is right or wrong, more attention is paid to ethics in the workplace that sensitizes leaders and staff as to how they should act.
Business ethics primarily represents the philosophy of business, which aims to determine the fundamental objective of the organisation. So for instance, the objective of an organization is to maximize shareholder returns, and then sacrificing profits for other concerns is a violation of its fiduciary responsibility.
The ethical issues accounts for the rights and duties between a company and its employees, suppliers, customers and neighbors, its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. Some of the other issue concerning relations between different companies include hostile take-over’s and industrial espionage, some of the related issues include corporate governance, corporate social entrepreneurship, political contributions, legal issues such as the ethical debate over introducing a crime of corporate manslaughter, and the marketing of corporations’ ethics policies.
