Social Responsibility and Ethics in Strategic Management Chapter 3 Learning Objectives

Encouraging Ethical Behavior

• Whistleblowers
• employees who report illegal or unethical behavior on the part of others

Guidelines for Ethical Behavior

• Ethics
• the consensually accepted standards of behavior for an occupation, trade or profession
• Morality
• one’s rules of personal behavior based on religious or philosophical grounds
• Law
• the formal codes that permit or forbid certain behaviors and may or may not enforce ethics or morality

Guidelines for Ethical Behavior

• Utilitarian approach
• proposes that actions and plans should be judged by their consequences
• Individual rights approach
• proposes that human beings have certain fundamental rights that should be respected in all decisions

Guidelines for Ethical Behavior

• Justice approach
• decisions must be equitable, fair and impartial in the distribution of costs and benefits to individuals or groups

Guidelines for Ethical Behavior

Cavanagh’s questions to solve ethical problems:

• Utility: Does it optimize the satisfactions of the stakeholders?
• Rights: Does it respect the rights of the individuals involved
• Justice: Is it consistent with the canons of justice?

Guidelines for Ethical Behavior

Kant’s categorical imperatives

• Actions are ethical only if the person is willing for the same action to be taken by everyone who is in a similar situation.
• Never treat another person simply as a means but always as an end.