Essay about Corporate Ethics Program

2. Laws must be static and unyielding in order to provide stability for a society.

What is ethically responsible management? How can a corporation, given its economic mission, be managed with appropriate attention to ethical concerns? These are central questions in the field of business ethics. There are two approaches to answering such questions. The first one is Milton Friedman’s shareholder theory of management and the second one is Edwards Freeman’s “Stakeholder” theory of management, two different views about the purpose and aims of a business.

Organizations that behave ethically are more apt to earn the trust of their customers, employees, and stockholders. Then there are companies that hide the true value of the company from possible investors, customers, employees, and the public at large showing a lack of ethically behavior. This does not all the time included just one company, but a group effort to hide, steal, and mislead everyone for personnel gains. Everyone that deals with any organization expects the upmost ethically behavior on all levels.

Ethics, ethical values, and social responsibility should all work in unison in a corporate business structure. These key traits are better defined as maintaining overall good business morals, obtaining employees who possess personal ethical values, and finally to behave ethically and with sensitivity toward social, cultural, economic and environmental issues. For a business to better ensure these quality business traits a code of ethics should be adopted by the business. In the cases of Bernie Madoff and Enron, the most well-known financial scandals in history, I feel, gave a major hand in pushing business all across America to have and enforce the code of ethics.

The survey was performed in 2010 involving members of the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association (ECOA). They focused on the evolution of business ethics by analyzing six other studies over a span of two-and-a-half decades. Members of the survey were ethics manager, but members on the previous studies were regular employees and management. The results of the analysis of the previous studies showed that ethics programs in companies during a time span of the 1980’s through the 1990’s was used to show social responsibilities and not necessarily to enforce it throughout the company. It showed that ethics programs now that companies follow ethical laws and they are motivated to be ethical. Another result of the study showed that ethics training at companies has increased since the 1990’s due to the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws directed at ethics. The passing of the laws in the early 2000’s has led to ethics being a major component of everyday

An initial new hire and employee ethics training has to be develop and administered. Also on-going ethics refresher training for use throughout the employees career with Company Q will need to be incorporated in the program. Systems will be developed and put in place to monitor, audit, and report ethics violations. A time-line to re-evaluate these programs and their effectiveness towards meeting the companies social responsibility goals will be established. Based on the evaluation a revision or revamp of the program if necessary will be initiated. The ethics program needs to be reviewed and understood by all employees and expectation for compliance very clear. This can be accomplish by tying compliance in some form to employees and leadership individual performance goals. Shareholders all the way down to entry-level employees will benefit from the ethics program which will also put the company on track to being more socially responsible. Once a code of ethics is in place and training has been given, then Company Q can begin developing trust within the company and employees as well as the community. Continued education and training will enable the company to become more socially responsible.

Every business develops a set of ethical principles that they abide by. The business ethical principles intentions: it construct the business certainty in the community , maintain the employees liveried in what the business attempt to have as structural conducts and aid the employees consume principles to make ethical choices that guards the business. In a culture with a diverse assessment structure and augmented judgment visibly by companies with changeable ethics and interests, there appears to be further difficulties on business individuals to make tougher ethical assessments. In our day-to-day performances, we depend on on our ethical principles to monitor us in the correct path and do the correct things. The substance of any efficacious and perpetual business is they segment a mutual ethical matter concentrating on presenting and generating value along with allocating their business values with the citizens they network with on a day-to-day basis.

Ethics are values and principles that individuals use to govern his decisions and activities. Ethics are about moral judgment of an individual about right and wrong. In an organization, code of ethics refers to set of guiding principles and organizations use these principles in their policies, programs, and decisions for business. Within organizations, decisions are taken by groups or individuals and these decisions are influenced by the culture of the company. Decision making and relevance of ethics may also differ for nonprofit and for profit organizations. In contemporary business environment, organizations must have a clear ethical policy and implement it in proper manner. There are many social, legal and economic outcomes that company has to face in case of any ethical dilemma, so there must be a smart strategy to deal with ethical dilemmas. In this paper, we will address the ethics for nonprofit and profits organizations, ethical dilemmas being faced or faced by each of these companies and the outcomes of these ethical dilemmas. Critique of actions of each of these companies will be provided from the point of view of applicable philosophical theories of organizational ethics.

(Panza & Potthast, n.d.) Ethics is very important to a company’s success. Ethical behavior can bring benefits to a business. They can attract customers, which can lead to a boost in sales and profits. It can attract the right employees and increase productivity. It can also attract investors and keep the company’s share price high. Unethical behavior on the other hand can damage a company’s reputation and make it less appealing to stakeholders. It could also result in lower profits.

2. Ethical Issues in Business. It seems that every day in the news we are hearing of new company that has acted at least unethically and possibly illegally in the operation and financial reporting of their company's business dealings. There are many ethical issues in business. One major issue that we see is over and under reporting net income. Companies like to show that every quarter the net income of the business has an increase or profit. In order to show this they adopt unethical or illegal means in the operation and financial reporting. One such method is the indiscriminate use of stock options for employees that enable companies to take employment costs off balance sheet and inflate earnings. With the recent ethical issues we have

Today’s business world presents numerous ethical issues. In today’s world above board/moral ethics in organizations do not often materialize intuitively. Organization must strive to provide employees with a clear understanding of the overall company vision. This will aid employees in practicing the code of ethics, policies and procedures in the workplace. Companies must be unwavering in continuously delivering the uppermost ethics of provision in which customers, applicants and employees are entitled to under fair business practices. One major core value is to uphold responsible and fair business practices.

• Describe the social implications of business ethics facing the selected business in its different areas or activity (P3)

Code of ethics, are implemented to educate employees on the ethical principles, morals and values of a company or organization. Organizations such as the National Association for Social Workers (NASW), and the National Organization for Human Services (NOHS) have ethical codes in place for individuals working within the Human Services field. The American Psychological Association (APA) have ethical principles for psychologists. Furthermore, journalist’s and corporations have ethical codes they must follow, yet their codes are significantly different compared to the NASW, NOHS, and APA organizations.

Every organization also has a profession responsibility to conduct business honestly and ethically. Our readings reported, “Experts estimated that U.S. companies lose about $600 billion a year from unethical and criminal behavior” Kinicki and Kreitner (2009). The organization could avoid having ethical issues by meeting the

Corporate social responsibility has become a major issue in the recent past to the extent in which there are watchdog organizations that monitor actions of corporations and file a report indicating companies that aren’t socially responsible. Such organizations are known as sustainability auditing firms (Gallagher, 2012). This has made most of the companies that are growing to issue corporate social responsibility reports alongside their annual business reports. Citigroup is a financial service company that has been able to do this with other companies. In fact, it should be noted that Citigroup, Inc. is the world’s largest financial service corporations with a revenue base of over 130 billion dollars (MacDonald, 2011). Citigroup, Inc. has appeared in the list of Forbes 100 and was been rated in 2007 as one of the most responsible top 50 companies. The company employs more than 300000 employees today. Hence, this paper will look at the extent to which Citigroup, Inc. has put in place responsible practices and corporate ethics and how they account for the influence of their stakeholder’s actions (Carroll & Buchholtz, 2010).