1. Please provide 2 specific and detailed examples how culture influences the et
ID: 427316 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Please provide 2 specific and detailed examples how culture influences the ethical behavior of employees within an organization (2 short paragraphs will suffice)?
2. What personal value in busines ddecision making in situations - the development of a personal values staement and what happens when personal values don't align with corporate/institutional vales, providing specific examples?
3. Can you provide communication creditability with an audience and techniques both for stressing initial creditability aand for increasing acquired credibility providing specific examples as in the case of Groupon, Dell, original Tylenol recall, or Netflix)?
Explanation / Answer
It is our intent to focus on the practical application of ethics in decision making. We need to start by creating some clarifying distinctions to facilitate our purpose. First, we must acknowledge the vast amount of research and study on the topic, and recognize that our application of ethics within business decision making, only addresses a small portion of the much broader topic. Second, our goal is to address decision making ethics in view of our decision making model in a way that will enable a consistent application of ethics in the decision making process.
Distinguishing Morals from Ethics in Decision Making
In our research we have found an overwhelming amount of information just to address the meaning or distinction between "morals" and "ethics." There are a large range of views that include the words being synonyms and the word ethics being "moral philosophy," or the study of moral principles. Both relate to determination of right conduct.
For our purpose we will reserve the term "moral" for use in a personal decision making context. This means that we will use "moral" when dealing with personal or life decisions with a focus on "right conduct" as the result of a personal choice. Ethical decision making will be reserved for use in a group decision making context. Specifically, we will address ethical decision making in business as providing the guiding requirements or goals for right conduct. These requirements often come as the result of organizational definition, agreement, or long-standing custom. There is clear recognition that ultimately a personal choice must be made with respect to right conduct, but business ethics will provide the assessment framework for correct behavior in the business organization.
How Important is the source of ethical standards in business decision making?
A large portion of the study of ethics deals with the approach or source of the principles or standards to be used for ethical decision making in business. A number of schools of thought have developed that include the following approaches (in no specific order):
Utilitarian
Moral rights
Universalist
Cost-benefit
Fairness or justice
Common good
Virtue
Deontological (based on study of moral obligation)
Theological
Contextualist
Principle-based
As well as others
The good news is that, in general, most approaches will lead to similar choices for most decisions involving ethics. There are obvious and sometimes notable exceptions, but these often involve ethical dilemmas that can only be addressed in the context of the specific decision being made.
Ethics in decision making impacts the choices for words and actions
In confining ethical decision making to a business or group context, decisions on ethics are necessarily limited to actions and words (e.g., no deceit in sales promotion, use words to manipulate performance, ...). Right behavior can be evaluated though actions and words, but there is no way to know one's thoughts. Per our distinction, thoughts and beliefs (e.g., I want to help and benefit my customer as opposed to I want their money without regards to what is right, personal gain at the cost of someone else's reputation, ...) will be confined to moral decisions that are part of personal decision making.
Clearly our thoughts affect our words and deeds, and in a group context, ethics in decision making can be evaluated through the tangible evidence and outcomes from words and actions. Again, thoughts and motivation are left to the personal realm. As a consequence, evaluation of appropriate ethical behavior will have limitations. In all outcomes there are the following possibilities:
Right motivation with right action
Right motivation with wrong action
Wrong motivation with right action
Wrong motivation with wrong action
Given the difficulty in exposing true motivation, ethical assessments will inherently be limited to an evaluation emphasis on action or outcome.
Will an immoral person make an ethical decision or a moral p
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