Good ethical business decisions Essay

Introduction

Business decisions depend on the firm’s policies and organizational culture. What is an organization culture? It is a unique procedure done through a combination of executable set of instructions, thoughts and rules, which distinguishes one company from others. The culture is attributable to a collective of phenomenon connected to different aspects and departments in the organization or firm, for the purpose of guidance through its undertakings.

Enforcing Good Business Decisions through Organization Culture

One acquires organization cultures from the social setting of a firm or organization. When a person changes the job, the organization culture also changes, but only to certain levels because the concept following many structure rally behind enhancing the conscious and visible mind or decisions by managers.

In this case, employees perceive the undertakings in the organizational environment concerning set regulations. Organizational culture has been an operational concept of differentiating one firm from another. The same conception used to initiate the ethical culture especially the business decisions capable of enhancing growth, financial gains or solving unethical issues arising within the firm.

These rules ought to be part of the agreement where employees can view before making a decision to either follow through or reject. As an integral part of the organizational culture, incorporating ethics would be a major way of avoiding conflicts between individual values and work practices. Basing decisions on accepted culture therefore involves systematic analysis and alignment of all unprincipled behaviours. Standardized ethical culture in business is not possible because most organizations have unique ethical problems.

Importance of Ethics in Businesses

Most business firms have weak cultures where there are no standards and guidelines to follow or are nonexistent. A process called “enculturization” enlightens employees on the cultural ethics and these are not evident at majority of the contemporary companies since most members of the management team are part of the sources of inequity (O’Guinn et al, p.18). Ethical decisions and efforts have to originate from management.

Leaders are an integral part of a firm’s profitability and can either enforce changes or use ethical strategies to enhance strict measures over the employees’ performance as per the existing law. Dictatorship and undemocratic practices often lead to business losses and therefore managers have to develop leadership reputations by being democratic but strict on imposition of ethical issues. Ethically a morally upright leader ought to be demonstrating some ethical principled traits such as integrity (Wimmer and Dominick, p.33).

Making good and ethical decisions in a firm requires a manager who is able to emphasize on the importance of morality by communicating openly or regularly and integrating a rewarding system. An ethical administrator also acts through evidence and offers transparency by having an independent body assigned to assist in enhancement of ethical decisions. Such managers base their executive ethical decisions explicitly on values, fairness and societal concerns.

Ethical business management

Business management requires focus on performance and protection of employees who are the key business assets. A well-aligned ethical system must focus on all key points to maintain organization’s reputation as opposed to only meet financial needs.

The management system has to align or articulate to business goals, identify the performance metrics and rewards individual over and above enhancing the firm’s growth and stability. This form of system has been the new focus by many successful firms such as Wal-Mart (Hargreaves, p23). A business manager has to work as per some existing code of conduct for the system to be in a position of making ethical decisions.

Enhancing Business Decisions through Socialization

Ethical decisions also have to incorporate the most recent and the informal styles of enhancing change. Business ethics are enforced through socialization and not setting up a number of rules to be followed. According to Hargreaves and Goodson (p98), a leader will have a hard time to change the way people think but it will be easy and possible to change their behaviours.

Mentoring is an informal training that changes the employee’s way of thinking. Encouraging employees’ socialization fosters ethical behaviours that are consistent with the cultural expectations of a firm. Sometimes people will behave without reacting to personal believes. They do so out of expectations or in accordance to internalized cultural expectations.

The business managers have to avoid the informal style of leadership such as the common ‘this is how we do things here’ style, which seems to change every now and then and take ages for employees to understand. Today, it is apparent that leaders must embark on the journey of searching for and understanding the importance of ethical business decisions.

The reason behind emergence of this trend rarely lies within the discipline of management, which seem to be surrendering its role to that of leadership. The other main reason concerns performance. Every great team such as a successful sales team has a performing leader steering its activities. High performing organization calls for a performing and strong leadership style.

Ethical decisions calls for guidance or assistance procedure that is concern with values of the way people create rapport, communicate and live by various significances for life. For the decisions to be effective, employees and clients expectations have to take over the determined ethical acts (Hargreaves, p98).

Good business decisions require leadership style that avails chances of employees’ interactive participation over matters of concern. In line with MacMillan, (52) dynamic dialogue cools any conflicting thought and maintains the cooperation between the involved parties.

One key factor that is evident today is the need to search for and understand the role of ethical decision-making in businesses. The groups involved must have trust as a pre-requisite aspect of leadership that call for those in charge to portray honesty. It also call for the leaders to show concern and care for their followers needs and thoughts but at the same time make certain that they remain accountable over their deeds and the firm’s performance.

Secondly, the leader ought to honour commitments and pronouncements. Respect is an inevitable aspect of ethical leadership in which case the leader ought to respect the opinion of others; respond to their communication respectably owing to the thought that differences of opinion is an eminent sign of progress.

Lastly, it is important for the leaders to have a set of values, which their followers can identify with or connect to such as courageousness, reliability, integrity, competence, honesty, altruism, and fairness (MacMillan, 60). The most important aspect of ethical decision-making is enhancing trust among employees.

According to Hargreaves (p23), trust is like a pillar that runs through every aspect of business management, thus ensuring its success. People will take time to trust and thus the leader should have a consistent and honest style of making decisions. This may require seeking other measure of reaching for the employees’ backup such as use of technology.

Technology Interaction in Support of Ethical Business Decisions

According to Heifetz (p.33), the internet is a medium that is generating a lot of enthusiasm among most people especially the youth and it is equally advancing at a very high rate to the business world. Today people engage in an interactive form of discussions for fun as well as matters concern with business growth.

A manager can take advantage of the social sites such as facebook, twitter, MySpace, To-go, linked-In or emails servers to find others views of a certain matter before enforcing decisions. Such leisure spaces are perfect platforms for managers to entice for employees’ perspectives, since it is easily to find and capture attention.

Today almost everyone is dynamic and thus open-minded to capture any new ideas available from the virtual world such as the use of social sites or forums. Social, emotional, behavioural, physical and cognitive growths are very important aspects influencing ethical style of management. The leaders have great influences over employees’ performance especially in the developmental life-span stages.

There are unique kinds of behavioural pattern to expect from the social sites, thus the need for managers to suggest developmental concerns and appropriate actions informally to find out the reactions. Social sites such as facebook are excellent means of ensuring interactivity and attracting attention thus ensuring that everyone is able to know new business decisions and it provides them the chance to voice concerns and raise their point of view informally.

Conclusion

A manager who is able to capture attention through the social sites also benefits from the ability to form a forum of acquaintances within the workforce and improve the social forum by adding and finding support from new friends. Attractive marketing article and new information provides an attractive feature for most people, this means that the decision makers are able to capture attention and maintain potential clients as social friends easily.

The ability to use the social sites in providing employees with more information about the company is equally an advantage over management. Persuasive and encouraging ethical strategies are additional and easy to utilize in company’s group social sites or pages. Managers are able to avail the latest information about the business and bolster the list of amazing friends, who will equally enhance the democratic and ethical style of governance (O’Guinn et al, p.18).

Works Cited

Heifetz, Ronald. Leadership without Easy Answers. United Kingdom. Harvard University Press. 1994. Print.

Hargreaves, Andy. Teaching in the Knowledge Society. New York: Teachers’ College Press. 2003. Print.

Hargreaves, Andy. & Goodson, Ivor. Change over Time? Chicago. 2004. Print.

MacMillan, Robert. ‘Leadership succession: Cultures of teaching and educational change’. New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2000. pp. 52-71.

O’Guinn, Thomas. Allen, Chris. & Semenik, Richard. Advertising and Integrated Brand Promotion. Ohio, OH: South-Western Cengage learning publishers. 2008. Print.