Bus520 How Personal Can Ethics Get

1. Discuss how personal differences and preference can impact organizational ethics.

Ethics is essentially what is moral and what is immoral. Ethics are value system. Organizational ethics refers to rules (standards, principles & values) governing the conduct of organizational members and the consequences to organizational decisions.

Organizations are run by people. So what the executives/managers think is immoral translates into what the organization thinks is immoral. Personal ethics often translates into organizational ethics, which is often built into the corporate culture.

Individual difference factors are personal factors about an individual that may influence their sensitivity to ethical issues, their judgment about such issues, and their related behavior. Many personal characteristics might impact ethical decision-making. The individual difference factor that has received the most research support is "cognitive moral development".

This framework, developed by Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1960s and extended by Kohlberg and other researchers in the subsequent years, helps to explain why different people make different evaluations when confronted with the same ethical issue. It states that an individual's level of "moral development" affects their ethical issue recognition, judgment, behavioral intentions and behavior and it passes through stages as they mature starting with small children or adolescents to adulthood. The cognitive moral development framework is relevant to business ethics because it offers a powerful explanation of individual differences in ethical reasoning. Individuals at different levels of moral development are likely to think differently about ethical issues and resolve them differently.

An executive who believes in growing and expending the business without bothering about what is the right or wrong approach would set immoral and unethical organizational culture. Such executives will go to the extent of bribing judiciary and...