| Popis: |
In the last few decades, business ethics has emerged as an important issue in society and it is became critical to business success in the long term. Business ethics deals with good vs. bad or right vs. wrong behaviour and practices occurring in business context. In order to regulate these issues, the majority of U.S. companies introduced ethics codes during the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, first in the USA, Europe and then through local subsidiaries overseas. Today, more than 50% of the 200 biggest companies in the world have one of the forms of ethics code. According to the Institute of Business Ethics in UK, most firms (85 of the FTSE100) have codes of ethics. However, nowadays it is considered that ethics code is not the only factor impacting ethical organisation i.e. it does not necessarily mean that all companies that have ethics code are ethical in their business operations. Also, it is established that merely having an ethics code is not enough to ensure ethical behaviour, e.g. Enron had ethical code in place, but the company lacked organisational culture. This coincides with numerous studies proving the fact that existence of ethical code is not enough and that a company should establish ethical operations comprising ethical leadership and ethical organisational culture. Leadership is the key source of ethical guidelines within an organisation and it impacts many positive results as well as implementation of ethical organisational culture. Therefore, in a life of an organisation it is especially important to develop both - ethical leadership and organisational culture – which together protect from unethical behaviour whilst promoting ethical behaviour. |
