What it means to maintain an ethical culture within the organization
What it means to maintain an ethical culture within the organization
The ability to maintain an ethical culture within an organization forms a key part of its success. The responsibility of maintaining the companys values, principles and beliefs is not the duty of a single individual or department. However, everyover including supervisors, managers, executives, board and officers have a critical part to play in nurturing ethical behaviour. Moreover, everybody is a role model to colleagues and can motivate and encourage them to engage in the right. Therefore, maintaining ethical culture is concerned with collective responsibility. Each individual or department inspires ethical business behaviour. In so doing, they can influence of workers commitment to the organization, employee satisfaction, firms expenses, employee performance, and rate of misconduct.
Companies can maintain ethical culture in their business through the informal and formal organizational mechanisms, the leaders actions and beliefs, and the firm life cycle. For instance, leaders must work to establish a value-based integrity program that also motivates compliance with the legislation. Similarly, they should also display their concern for the needs of external and internal stakeholders and dedicate their efforts to making the interests of others a commercial priority. Most importantly, they should understand that ethical leadership in a firm demands careful communication, coaching, and modelling. In order to illustrate their commitment to maintenance of business ethics, they need to enhance ethics in the climate and culture of the company by motivating thoughtful dissent, celebrating the achievements, addressing emerging challenges, and showing care. The ethics culture in the firm can also be built by being fair, ensuring that ethics is a priority and recruiting the right people.
Commitment to ethical business practices should be the precedence of all stakeholders in the company. In order to sustain a positive ethical culture, the business must initiate and execute performance objectives linked to organizational goal. Therefore, a holistic approach of maintaining the ethical business culture should be embraced.
The role of culture in global business ethics
Ethics offer an arrangement of principles and rules that guide individuals in making decisions in different situations. Certainly, diferent cultures have varied values that determine what kind of actions are acceptable. A culture of business ethics is often play a significant part in the globalization strategies. culture affects how local values impacts global business ethics. There are diversities in the manner in which important cultures touches on certain ethical behaviours. For instance, every expert is affected by the experiences, social programming, and values faced from childhood.
Culture affects different phases of operations and management including corporate mission, development and research, marketing, and human resources. Ethics plays a part in the management practices especially those practices linking to employment and human resources. Local culture influences the manner in which persons interpret the employer-employee relationship.
Culture affects how individuals view the role of each other in the workplace. For instance, gender isssues are normally affected by local insights of women in the jobplace. Global businesses at times define whether an individual can be effective in a certain culture depending on fundamental standards in that culture.
Global companies are trying to sell their items depening on the environmental and sociocultural merits. Firms whose practices are deliberated as unethical may find their international performance affected when the public boycott their products.
The importance and rationale for maintaining an ethical culture within the entire organization
It is important to maintain ethical culture within the entire organization. Firstly, it ensures that marketing, corporate values, messaging, and global branding are localized. For instance, it ensures that messaging of the products is conducted in a manner that promotes cultural expectations or norms. In so doing, the company is able to achieve market share and better performance.
Maintaining ethical culture also improves communication hence eliminates conflicts witnessed in different parts of the world. The ability to understand different communications in diverse cultures helps to save money and time and is the foundation of communication success that can strengthen the business objectives. The ability to realize simple issues in communication may improve the performance of business.
Maintaining ethical culture is essential because they help in identification of cultural themes that have a significant effect on the way that culture engages in business. For instance, the cultural themes of chinese is based in Confucian values and folk belief including trustworthiness, endurance, thrift and familial devotion. Such values greatly affects business. In most cases, cultural themes may create a disconnect which wastes many business opportunities.
Sustaining ethical cultures helps to appreciate the group dynamics. For instance, one is able to know how persons from a particular culture cooperate in groups. Group dynamics understanding in a certain culture is important for business because it substantially affect the sales process. Countries with individualist cultures especially the US, customers make individual choices when making a purchasing decision. On the other hand, in collectivist cultures, choices are substantially affected by the groups such as community, colleagues, friends, extended family and family. China has collectivist culture hence the sales process and marketing collaterals should be aimed towards the group as opposed to an individual.
Methods to motivate ethical business practices
Employees in a company should be motivated to adopt ethical behaviours in business. Some of the methods to inspire such practices is by training, rewarding, role modelling, and work-life balances.
Training
Staff should be trained on code of ethics of the company in order to serve ethicaly. In this regard, the firm should organize regular seminars on ethics and the way to deal with ethical dilemma among officers. Provision of more resources and training and paying close attention on ethical standards enables the staff to understand what their job expectations.
Rewarding
The company should introduce rewarding schemes for persons who are involved in ethical behaviours. For instance, when particular officers put their personal interest aside and prioritizes on customers, they must be rewarded and used as an case to encourage others. Moreover, rewarding more employees for comprehensive ethical decisions motivate others to follow the same.
Policies
Executing a policy to discourage unethical practice in business is the best alternative. For instance, if employees often utilize the copy machine to develop personal materials or engages in theft of supplies, the company can implement a policy that demand a code for the machine. In so doing, it will lead to workers not having to risk their individual integrity to test. Similarly, ethical behaviours can be incorporated in company policy.
Stating expectations
The organization must declare its values in the workers handbook. Such standards are discussed and executed in daily business engagements by workers in a supervisory capacity. It is recommended that firm must embrace a collection of values that contribute to ethical corporate climate. Some of the values include intergrity, kindness, transcendence, justice, wisdom, and self-control
Role Models
The management must participate in ethical practices in business for the employees to follow their examples. Therefore, managers and supervisors should be held to a higher moral standard so that they have unequivocal authority when they deliver staffs expectations to the same issues. The executives should participate in consistent discussions with workers on potential ethical matters.
Recommend tactical methods that might be used within each of their areas