Ethical Management

Ethics and ethical behavior has always been a concern for managers; however, ethical issues have become even more important over the years beginning in the early 2000s when news of corporate scandals based on fraud, financial dishonesty and personal greed of senior executives emerged from major US corporations. It is now clear that it is imperative for businesses to take ethics seriously and establish and enforce ethical standards for current and future workers. This chapter discusses ethical management, which has been described as a managerial function to regulate the conduct or behavior of the employees from top to bottom through written code or unwritten code and as a managerial tool to enforce integrity of employees where codified rules and regulations are absent yet it is necessary for employees and the company to follow reasonable ethical standards or well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do. Specific topics include universal standards for ethical behavior, criteria for ethical decision making, elements of ethical organizations, roles and responsibilities of chief ethics officers and guidelines for ethical decision making