Business Ethics Articles

In a world of global competition, it gets difficult to stay by your true values, business values, moral values, ethical values, business rules, etc. everybody has their own purpose in life and so go on to fulfill their desires and ambitions, while some may have company commitments to get those added perks and benefits while some work for their own personal goal. There are so many discourses and workshops happening that teaches you ethical values but we don’t really follow them and speaking in ideal terms, they have been incapable of delivering the results, its really high time now that we start thinking ethical stuff and be ethical in our behavior or whatever we do. You may have or must have come across many a articles in newspapers or magazine talking about political corruption, the use of diplomacy in companies, the greed factor, etc. we often here such news in TV or newspapers and the number is growing by the day, what may be the cause of this, have people lost their moral values, do they have ethical understanding of things or whether they are just doing it for the heck of it, is it for fun or just doing for personal gains? The only solution we have now is to spread a word of moral value, which will be instilled in them deeper in hearts. Here are my two bits for business ethics articles.

Business ethics are especially important today because companies are doing business at larger scale and that would mean larger work force there is dependency on each other to get the output, if one goes fail then everything else or everybody else suffers. Business ethics articles all over say that when a person is firm on his ethics, we are sure that nothing would go wrong and if at all he makes mistakes, we can show him sensible course of action, which would change the results. Some people might mistake moral values for ethical values and vice versa, although they sound very similar there is some difference in them the morals are external things, and are a set of imposed rules while ethics are based on principles which a person follows from the very start, its an individual thinking of each person. For a person to study proper ethical values it is very important to let him know the ethical understanding and what stands the base for these values.

For our better understanding, we can distinguish the stages of ethical understanding, each playing a different role though all are inter connected:

1. The very first stage of ethical understanding is the obedience and punishment stage where a person tries to avoid the punishment and he may give excuses like, “there is no point in getting in to trouble”.
2. The second stage is that of self-interest and a person might be very eager to behave nicely because he expects some reward and the mental thinking of that person is “if I do this, I will get that”.
3. The third stage is the conformity stage, this stage a person is already gaining some intangible reward and he thinks, this honor will surely please some of his close family members.
4. The forth stage is that of authority in which a person is seeking a good social status and gaining reputation and he thinks, that people will treat me as a respectful person in whatever field he might be in.
5. The fifth stage is socially driven, a person has some behavioral changes, which turns into his principles now they stand on the fact that, “living a good life is being considerate of others”.
6. The sixth stage is ethically driven stage where in a person sets some values which he will follow and makes his aim to follow the personal ethical code.

People who follow their duties and principles religiously are the ones successful in life, the most successful of people I have seen are stuck in stage 1 and 2, some of them don’t even go beyond that stage, none of these stages require the ethical thoughts to move one, its only in the later stages, they require some thoughts relating to personal choice and reflection of their actions. The only advice is want to give you is don’t go overboard or set some ethical standards to please others in authority, be in your own control and take the steps which are really needed, the real true value of ethics will arise when people think over the subject matter and values it. Ethics are different from morals, we have seen that earlier, Ethics means exploring our own self and take your thoughts to a more moral or valued destination, ethics are not to be imposed, they develop within one’s own inner self and it’s the idea of living freely with ethical values instilled. These business ethics articles are really useful.