BUSINESS ETHICS, THE

CHANGING
ENVIRONMENT, AND
STAKEHOLDER
MANAGEMENT

De Mesa, Dwight Jenna L.

Buensuceso, Bren Ardel L.
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 Providing reasons for how things
ought to be in the economic world
 Requires arranging values to guide
decisions, understanding facts and
constructing arguments
 Choices about what the laws should
be and whether to follow them
 Choices about economic and
social issues outside the domain of
law
 Choices about the priority of self-
interest over the company’s
interests
1. Saves financially and economically
2. Builds relationships, reputation, morale
and productivity
3. Maintains integrity, culture,
communication, and the common
good
4. Creates investor loyalty, customer
satisfaction and business performance
and profits
Individual

Organizational

Association

Societal

International
MYTH
– a belief given uncritical
acceptance by the members of the
group, especially in support of existing
or traditional practices and institutions
– do not represent truth but popular
and unexamined notions
 • Based on personal or religious beliefs, and
1. Ethic is personal that the one decides what is right and
wrong in the privacy of one’s conscience

• Business practices are basically amoral-not

2. Business and ethics
necessarily immoral-because businesses
don’t mix
operate in a free market

3. Business ethics is • It holds that no right or wrong way of

relative believing or acting exists

4. Good business means • Executives and firms that maintain a good

good ethics corporate image are de facto ethical

5. Information is neutral • Information in computing are neither moral

and amoral nor immoral but are amoral
1. Laws do not cover all aspects or “gray areas” of
a problem

2. Free market and regulated market mechanisms

do not effectively inform owners and managers
how to respond to complex issues that have far
reaching ethical consequences

3. Ethical reasoning is necessary because complex

moral problems require an intuitive or learned
understanding and concern for fairness, justice,
due process to people, groups and communities
 Managers lying to employees
 Office nepotism and favoritism
 Taking credit for other’s work
 Receiving/offering kickbacks
 Stealing from the company
 Firing an employee for whistle-blowing
 Padding expense accounts
 Divulging confidential information or trade secrets
 Terminating employment without sufficient notice
 Using company property/materials for personal
use
 Government
 Sales
 Law
 Media
 Finance
 Medicine
 Banking
 Manufacturing
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 ECONOMIC – continues to evolve into a
more global context of trade, markets and
resource flows
 TECHNOLOGICAL – has ushered in the
advent of electronics communication, social
online networking, and the Internet
 GOVERNMENT/REGULATORY – continues
to issue regulatory laws and procedures to
protect consumers and restrict unfair
corporate practices
 LEGAL – questions and issues affect all of
these environmental dimensions and every
stakeholder and investor
 DEMOGRAPHIC/SOCIAL – continues to
change as national boundaries experience the
effects of globalization and the workforce
becomes more diverse
 Are individuals, companies, groups, and
even nations that cause and respond to
external issues, opportunities, and threats
 A way of understanding the ethical
effects of environmental forces
and groups on specific issues that
affect real-time stakeholders and
their welfare
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 Ethic courses should not:
 Advocate a set of rules from a single
perspective
 Not offer only one best solution to
specific ethical problems
 Not promise superior or absolute ways
of thinking and behaving in situations
 Ethic courses and training can do the following:
 Provide people with rationales, ideas, and vocabulary
 Help people make sense of their environments
 Provide intellectual weapons
 Enable employees to act as alarm systems for
company practices
 Enhance conscientiousness and sensitivity
 Enhance moral reflectiveness and strengthen moral
courage
 Increase people's ability to become morally
autonomous ethical dissenters
 Improve the firm’s moral climate
Kohlberg’s 3 levels of moral development:
Level 1: Preconventional level (self-orientation)
▪ Stage 1: Punishment
▪ Stage 2: Reward seeking

Level 2: Conventional level (others orientation)

▪ Stage 3: Good person
▪ Stage 4: Law and order

Level 3: Postconventional level (universal, humankind, orientation)

▪ Stage 5: Social contact
▪ Stage 6: Universal ethical principles

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