Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, Second Edition

HOW TO RESOLVE ETHICAL DILEMMAS?

Ethical issues take centre-stage in organizations today as managers, executives and employees face increasingly complex decisions. Most of these decisions are made in an organizational environment with different value systems, moral philosophies, competitive pressure and political ideologies, all of which provide ample opportunity for misconduct. Ferrel et al.¹⁵quote a KPMG survey in 2000 which revealed that 76 per cent of a the nearly 24,000 workers covered in the survey indicated that they had observed violations of the law or of company standards during the previous year. With such abundance of opportunities for unethical behaviour, ‘companies are vulnerable to both ethical problems and legal violations if ...