Locate an article that discusses the topic of business ethics. Topic ideas might include the role of ethics in the workplace, breach of ethics, the effect of internal and external forces on ethical compliance, global ethical considerations within a business or ethics and employees. Note these are ideas; please expand within the parameters of ethical topics as they relate to business ethics. Respond to the following questions: Summarize the article and align it with the author’s main point. How does this article contribute to contemporary thinking about business ethics? How can you apply information in this article to your field? How did this article fit your ethical view? Your response should be a minimum of 2 double-spaced pages not including the title and reference pages.
Business Ethics Article Review
Summary
Carucci (2016) of the Harvard Business Review explains why business people violate ethics. He basically says that the reason for this is that these people have good intentions but their bosses expect them to do certain things and doing them may not be ethical. Carucci (2016) says that progress has been made in business ethics, partly because of laws that control some of the unethical practices of yesteryear. However, he also says, “Despite progress, 41% of workers reported seeing ethical misconduct in the previous 12 months, and 10% felt organizational pressure to compromise ethical standards” (Carucci, 2016). He uses the recent Wells Fargo scandal as an example. In that issue, 5300 employees fraudulently opened over 1 million accounts without client permission to do so. This indicates a systematic issue rather than an employee ethics issue.
Carucci (2016) then goes on to list 5 ways that business organizations cause their employees to make unethical choices. These include making it unsafe to speak up against unethical practices, putting excessive pressure on employees to reach unrealistic performance standards, having conflicting goals that come off as unfairness, leaders not controlling employees behavior, and having no good examples to follow (Carucci, 2016). If a company has ethical policies that are upheld and there is an ethical culture, employees may not be so tempted to violate ethical standards to meet goals.