Business ethics

Business ethics is a field of ethics that deals with moral and ethical problems arising in the business world. Interest in business ethics grew rapidly since the 1980s and the demand for more ethical business process is still increasing nowadays. The analysis of business ethics problems can be made on various levels: from the ethical issues arisen by the acts of a business organization as a whole and up to the conduct of individuals who work in a certain company. Ethical issues arise in the sphere of management, marketing, production, business strategy, etc. Business can’t be considered separately from ethics as people face the necessity to make ethical decisions in their everyday business activity. Ethical business activity promotes growth of a company, establishing and developing good business relations with different interested groups. It makes the company more attractive for potential highly qualified employees. It contributes to consecutive and steady development and growth of the company. In that way, application of ethical values to business lays the basis for a long-term, profitable business. However, business ethics is contradictory and never gives the only clear and right answers. There are many situations in day-to-day business activity when an ethical decision shouldn’t be made according to the “right-wrong” scale and should be considered from different points of view. Thus, such situations may cause ethical dilemmas. Most likely ethical dilemmas happen when there is a conflict of interests, when alternative decisions can be justified equally, when the consequences are of paramount importance for all interested groups. There are various instances of ethical issues in today’s business that impact a community and an organization. For instance, an ethical issue is if a seller has the moral right to conceal information of product’s poor quality for the sake of economical benefit and this way to make a customer get the product at an unreasonable price. Another ethical issue is if a person should support a colleague to choose another place of employment and this way get that vacant higher post realizing that he is not competent enough for it yet. One more example of the ethical dilemma is if a manager should dismiss a part of employees because of unplanned production shortening and let others get 100 % salary or if he has to save all places of employment by shortening all salaries. Obviously, often any possible decisions of ethical dilemmas may be still fully or partly unethical and have a considerable impact on organizations as well as on the community.



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