... do rules. The creation of a strong ethical culture makes sound business sense, and it can be done by measuring and maximizing stakeholder trust. Some people who conduct research on this sort of thing distinguish between a business firm’s ethical ... ... workplace behavior. Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society, 5(4), 43-55; Forte. A. (2004). Business ethics: a study of the moral reasoning of selected business managers and the influence of organizational ethical climate....
... one another penetrates into every crevice and cranny of human life: the economical is perhaps the smallest part of it, yet even this is incalculable. John Stuart Mill (1848)[1] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In our first post[2] we proposed a universal business ethics principle: “A basic duty of every organization is to earn stakeholder trust.” Our hypotheses are that 1) while cultures and levels of economic development may vary widely, trust is defined by universally shared attributes, sometimes summarized as “character” and “competence”; 2) ...
... discerning and agreeing on globally appropriate rules for business behavior has been a formidable and contentious discussion among business leaders and academics.
While acknowledging all of the contentiousness, we now offer a proposal for a unifying global business ethics principle:
A basic duty of every organization is to earn stakeholder trust.
This principle is meant to replace a more familiar but flawed imperative: that the basic duty of each business leader is to “maximize shareholder value.” [2] Such a duty has never been explicitly written into corporate ...
