
What are the ethical responsibilities of a manager?
Managers monitor the behavior of employees in accordance with the organization ‘s expectations of appropriate behavior, and they have a duty to respond quickly and appropriately to minimize the impact of suspected ethical violations. Managers may be responsible for creating and/or implementing changes to the ethical codes or guidelines of an organization.
What are the moral responsibilities of managers essay?
Managers moral responsibility have several implications. The legal responsibility ensures that the company performs its duty in accordance with the law. This helps the company’s activities to flow easily and ensure there are no hiccups as the government or legal bodies has no business in interrupting its activities (Barrett, 1993).
Should managers be ethical in their decision making?
Why should managers use ethical criteria to guide their decision-making? Managers should behave ethically because the relentless pursuit of self-interest can lead to a collective disaster. When one or more managers start to profit from unethical conduct, unfortunately, other managers may make the decision to behave in the same way.
How to make ethical decisions in management?
- Assessment: Make sure you have all the facts about the assessment. ...
- Alternatives: Consider your choices. ...
- Analysis: Identify your candidate decision and test its validity. ...
- Application: Apply ethical principles to your candidate decision. ...
- Action: Make a decision. ...
What is ethical action?
Why do managers not treat their decisions as dilemmas?
How to respond to ethical uncertainty?
What does Introna teach about ethics?
What is ethics rooted in?
Is it difficult to be an ethical manager?
Is ethics an individual responsibility?
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Who is responsible for the ethical actions of a business?
Maintaining an ethical status is the responsibility of the manager of the business. According to a 1990 article in the Journal of Business Ethics, "Managing ethical behavior is one of the most pervasive and complex problems facing business organizations today."
What are the role of management in the workplace ethics?
Management plays an essential role in inculcating workplace ethics in employees. Bosses need to set an example for their subordinates. You need to come on time if you expect your team members to reach office on time. Management needs to act as a source of inspiration for the employees.
Who is responsible for ethical behavior?
Ethical behavior is easier for an individual than it is for a company. Companies have many individuals with differing opinions, values, and ideals. So, who's job is it to ensure a company is ethical? The answer is—everyone.
How do managers make decisions ethically?
The ethical principles contained in the code can be descriptive or normative. A descriptive code requires managers to question what people think is right and follow that pattern when making decisions. Normative ethics uses the ethics from society to help managers make decisions by focusing on the end result.
What role does the top management play in the ethical orientation of an organization?
Managers must be committed to making decisions in accordance with core values such as honesty, integrity, respect for others, taking responsibility for their actions and being accountable for them. To be an effective, ethical leader, managers must learn how to spot ethical issues in their organization.
What are the 3 types of management ethics?
Managerial ethics, are standards of conduct or moral judgement used by managers of organizations in caring out their business. Archi B Carroll, notes that three major levels of moral or ethical, judgement characterize managers: immoral management, amoral management, and moral management.
What do you mean by ethics in management?
Definition of ethical management It means the basic behavioral principles of business ethics that corporations. must strictly comply with in their relations with shareholders, customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and the environment.
What is values and ethics in management?
Ethical management is the practice of being honest and virtuous in a role as a manager. Management training will help you with this and there are several responsibilities and obligations of an ethical manager, including setting a good example, holding everyone to the same standard, and making expectations clear.
Your Legal and Ethical Responsibilities as a Manager in the Workplace
Managers at all levels are held to a high standard of ethical behavior. Every day, these individuals make key decisions that affect the companies for which they work, its shareholders, and all other stakeholders involved, including society as a whole.
Manager's Role in Ethics - Ethical Advocate
No surprise here—managers exercise great influence on employee attitudes and behavior. They play an essential role in creating, nurturing, and sustaining an ethical culture and an ethical workforce. Regulatory agencies acknowledge that fact, and they will scrutinize management practices, from time to time. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Securities and Exchange...
Role and function of ethical managers - BrainKart
Managers in both large and small enterprises face difficult ethical situations daily as they attempt to do their jobs. Since management decisions inherently involve ethical considerations, however, it is important that managers recognize the ethical elements that are embedded in their day-to-day job functions.
Introduction
In this paper, seven articles that are related to the issues of ethics in management have been reviewed. The paper focuses on the moral responsibilities of managers, moral dilemmas, the ideas of absolutism and relativism, and the ethics of reflective action research.
Literature Review: Managers as Moral and Ethical Agents
The idea that power corrupts is not a new one, but it can be challenged. For example, Badaracco (1992) describes such an observation as “grim” and “unrealistic” (p.64). The author demonstrates that managers are expected to deal with numerous moral dilemmas, which indicates that to be successful, they need an understanding of ethics.
Reflexive Action Research
Action research (AR) presupposes the combination of action and research that is carried out as “insider research” (McKay & Marshall, 2001). As a result, it is a process that is immediately practical and is concerned with applying, testing, and improving various solutions.
Conclusion
Modern managers are apparently under greater pressure to ensure ethical conduct in every one of their practices (including research), and nowadays, unethical business activities hardly receive any support in the theory of management.
How do organizations help managers to fulfill their roles as influencers of desired ethical behavior?
So how do organizations help managers to fulfill their roles as influencers of desired ethical behavior? They do it with a combination of training, communication, and consequences—good or bad.
How do managers influence employees?
No surprise here—managers exercise great influence on employee attitudes and behavior. They play an essential role in creating, nurturing, and sustaining an ethical culture and an ethical workforce. Regulatory agencies acknowledge that fact, and they will scrutinize management practices, from time to time.
What is the hallmark of an effective ethics and compliance effort?
For example, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in A Resource Guide to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, consider one hallmark of an effective ethics and compliance effort to be commitment from senior management, as reinforced by middle managers. “Compliance begins with the board of directors or senior executives, and must be reinforced and implemented by middle managers and employees at all levels,” it says.
What is an ethical advocate?
Ethical Advocate provides ethics and compliance training and consultation to organizational leaders. Contact us for information about comprehensive ethics and compliance solutions, including ethics and compliance training and confidential and anonymous hotlines.
Why are companies leveraging performance reviews and awards?
It also reports, “Companies are increasingly leveraging performance reviews and awards to incentivize employees who engage in ethical conduct or who actively support compliance issues.” Presumably, this includes managers as well.
What is the role of a manager in a company?
As a manager yourself, it is essential to understand and adhere to the ethical and legal obligations of your position in order to meet the expectations of all stakeholders, and to set an example of such behavior for others.
Why is it important to understand and adhere to the ethical and legal obligations of your position?
As a manager yourself, it is essential to understand and adhere to the ethical and legal obligations of your position in order to meet the expectations of all stakeholders, and to set an example of such behavior for others. What follows is a history, explanation and overview of business ethics and business law.
Why is it important for managers to understand Codes of Conduct?
Therefore, it is essential for managers to understand Codes of Conduct, Codes of Ethics, or any other official set of rules and to attain and keep records of related documentation laying out the expectations and guidelines for ethical behavior.
How are business ethics and business law related?
Business ethics and business law are interrelated in the sense that the ethical conduct of a business is often enforceable by legal means. This relationship is not unique to the United States; international entities such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations (UN) legally enforce ethical conduct across various countries.
How do managers affect stakeholders?
Businesses can either positively or negatively affect its stakeholders through its activities, objectives, and policies. Likewise, stakeholders can also positively or negatively affect businesses.
What are some examples of business ethics?
On a larger scale, business ethics also intersects with business law in areas such as the minimum wage, false claims on a product or service, and the hiring of illegal immigrants. All three examples are cases where the law plays a part in regulating behavior and likely goes against a company's Code of Conduct.
What to do when in question about a certain law or regulation?
When in question about a certain law or regulation, seek the advice of your company's legal department or consult a reputable business attorney of your choosing.
What are ethical issues in the workplace?
Ethical Issues in the Workplace. The ethical culture of an organization says a lot about what a company values. Ethics codes are one way to express the prevailing values and outlines guideposts to get to that goal. Unfortunately, many companies pay lip-service to such documents.
How to improve ethics in an organization?
Offer ethics training. Set up seminars, workshops, and similar ethical training programs. Use these training sessions to reinforce the organization’s standards of conduct, to clarify what practices are and are not permissible, and to address possible ethical dilemmas.
How to reduce ethical ambiguities?
Communicate ethical expectations. Ethical ambiguities can be reduced by creating and disseminating an organizational code of ethics. It should state the organization’s primary values and the ethical rules that employees are expected to follow. Remember, however, that a code of ethics is worthless if top management fails to model ethical behaviors.
Who wrote the book Organizational Behavior?
I recently read an interesting book by Stephen Robbins and Timothy Judge (Organizational Behavior). They offer a useful list of what management can do to create a more ethical organizational culture. They suggest a combination of the following practices:
Is ethics good business?
It is true that good ethics is good business. Perhaps not in the short-term but definitely in the ling-term when one’s ethical transgressions tend to catch up with a person or organization.
Is an entrepreneur who starts a new business considered a manager?
True or False? An entrepreneur who starts a new business is not considered to be a manager.
Is leadership part of a formal structure?
The leadership role is not part of a formal structure
What is ethical action?
Ethical actions flow from individuals taking responsibility. And, sometimes this might be very difficult and come at personal cost. But that is exactly what responsibility and accountability means. The dilemma of ethics in action.
Why do managers not treat their decisions as dilemmas?
The ethical problem is that managers often do not treat their decisions as dilemmas, implicitly or explicitly, because they value certain outcomes above all others, from the start. As such they transform ethical decisions into economic decisions—sometimes with devastating results.
How to respond to ethical uncertainty?
One response to the ethical uncertainty, and our desire to take responsibility, is to develop our ethical sensibility through the development of virtue. Aristotle suggested that we are what we repeatedly do. If we want to be fair we need to act fairly; considerate, act considerably; honest, act honestly; sincere, act sincerely, and so forth. But how do we know what fair, honest, sincere, etc., is in every situation? Aristotle says we need phronesis (practical wisdom)—the virtue that forms the foundation for all other virtues. Practical wisdom is the will to do the right thing and it is the knowledge of what the right thing is, in any particular situation. Note, all ethics starts with, and is rooted in, the will to do the right thing. Then follows the process of developing the skill to know what the right thing is. Aristotle suggested that the development of this skill is like the stone mason’s skill. It needs to develop through practice. This is best done explicitly and collectively. For example, how can we make our promotion process fairer? How can we distribute rewards more fairly? How can we become serious about our environmental footprint? For all these questions there is not a single right answer. We have to think it through, experiment, and learn to become practically wise. This is the work of ethics.
What does Introna teach about ethics?
Introna tells students that ethics are about the practice of values. In other words what do you value when you make decisions or act in certain ways. The problem is that you often have competing values (as well as different culturally defined values ).
What is ethics rooted in?
Note, all ethics starts with, and is rooted in, the will to do the right thing. Then follows the process of developing the skill to know what the right thing is. Aristotle suggested that the development of this skill is like the stone mason’s skill. It needs to develop through practice.
Is it difficult to be an ethical manager?
This is the work of ethics. Taking responsibility is difficult. Being an ethical manager is difficult. That is perhaps why many managers try and simplify it by deferring responsibility (to someone or something else) and by turning ethical choices into simple economic decisions, or decisions driven by simple metrics.
Is ethics an individual responsibility?
However, Dr. Introna argues that ultimately ethics is an individual responsibility. Responsibility cannot be outsourced or deferred. You cannot give away your responsibility to the organization, the group, your manager, the market, the shareholders, and so forth. Ethical actions flow from individuals taking responsibility.

Introduction
Literature Review: Managers as Moral and Ethical Agents
- Responsibilities and Imperatives
The idea that power corrupts is not a new one, but it can be challenged. For example, Badaracco (1992) describes such an observation as “grim” and “unrealistic” (p.64). The author demonstrates that managers are expected to deal with numerous moral dilemmas, which indicates that to be s… - Differences and Rationale for Decisions
Moral dilemmas are the issues, the solution to which is not obvious. In business, they can involve the problem of firing a friend or a single mother or, for example, offering a bribe in order to allow your workers to keep their workplaces (Badaracco, 1992; McDonald, 2010). Moral issues are con…
Reflexive Action Research
- Action research (AR) presupposes the combination of action and research that is carried out as “insider research” (McKay & Marshall, 2001). As a result, it is a process that is immediately practical and is concerned with applying, testing, and improving various solutions. For example, a study of the communication issues between the managers and the employees that are carried o…
Conclusion
- Modern managers are apparently under greater pressure to ensure ethical conduct in every one of their practices (including research), and nowadays, unethical business activities hardly receive any support in the theory of management. However, the relative nature of ethics and morals persists, and it can be claimed that the guidelines differ within ...
References
- Badaracco, J.L. (1992). Business ethics: Four spheres of executive responsibility. California Management Review, 34(3), 64-79. Cunliffe, A. L. (2004). On becoming a critically reflexive practitioner. Journal of Management Education, 28(4), 407-426. Holt, R. (2006). Principals and practice: Rhetoric and the moral character of managers. Human Relations, 59(12), 1659-1680. Ib…