How Does Corporate Culture Affect Personal Ethics

Introduction

To fully understand the statement we must first decide if corporate culture can affect personal ethics and secondly, whether that is a positive or negative.

Firstly, we need to understand what is meant by ethics. The Oxford Dictionary defines Ethics “as Moral principles that govern a person 's behaviour or the conducting of an activity” whilst it can also be described “as a composite of the individual ethical values of managers and both the formal and informal policies on the ethics of the organization” (Hunt eta l 1989 as cited in Marta et al. 2012, p 230). Ethics has also been described as the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society to evaluate their reasonableness and their implications

As Barbara Toffler, Head of Consulting was to state “When I brought up ethics I was looked at is if I had teleported from another world”. (Trevino & Nelson, p. 190).

So despite the ethics of the company still existing in formal documents, the type of business that the organisation was involved in had evolved and the ethics had failed to keep pace. The ethical practices that applied to Arthur Anderson Accounting were not suitable for Arthur Anderson Consulting producing conflicts of interest most notably in relation to the Enron case which in part led to the collapse of Arthur Anderson’s accounting business. Additionally the most senior person in the company did not ensure that the company’s ethical standards were upheld.

So even if companies prepare ethical standards, and spend resources on ensuring that those standards are known by all employees, if a company does not actively follow these, and in some cases actively works in opposition to them, then the employees will adopt the standards that are in operation rather than the stated

1999; Singhapakdi et al. 2001, 2008) that attest to how corporate values, expressed in various forms, do indeed affect ethical outcomes.” (Marta et al. 2012, p 230)

The examples outlined in this essay demonstrate the relationship between corporate ethical values and ethical intentions of individuals and highlight that it is beneficial for companies to focus on communication and rewarding good ethics and conversely developing sanctions for failures in such standards. to ensure that ethical standards are not only policy, but are delivered by individual employees.

Whilst it is appropriate in certain circumstances for employees to be influenced by company culture in regards to ethical behaviour, it can also be inappropriate and lead to severe difficulties both for the organisation and the individual. Like everything in ethics there is no straightforward absolute and continual assessment, control and auditing is required to mitigate the