Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Sustainability
Reflection and Discussion Forum– Week 2
Thomas PazoTourinho
University of the Cumberlands
Human Resource Management
Dr. Preiksaitis
August 30th,2022
Chapter 2 – Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Sustainability
Our reading assignment for this week discussed ethics and its meaning, and how HRM can play an instrumental role in developing an ethical culture within an organization. The authors also talked about human resource ethics, explained the concepts behind corporate social responsibility and sustainability, and described a social audit to the students.
The first part of the chapter was a definition of ethics and how it can be explained as the discipline of what is right/wrong, good/bad and moral duty and obligation. The chapter made a good point that business ethics scandals are making headlines more often nowadays. An interesting reflection is to think about where ethical behavior is guided from. That made students reflect on sources of ethical guidance, legislations, the creation of codes of ethics, and the functions of an ethics officer at the workplace.
The authors did an outstanding job discussing Human Resource ethics, and how lining pay to ethical behavior is such a relevant topic in today’s business scenario. Thus, it was explained the importance of ethics training for corporations and employees, which transitioned into Corporate Social Responsibility, which will be discussed in the questions below. Other important topics that were part of chapter 2 were corporate sustainability and social audit.
Questions
- How do firms benefit from a strong ethical culture? How can HR departments foster such cultures?
- What is corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Identify and discuss the characteristics and the arguments for and against corporate social responsibility
- Why is a code of ethics important? What should be included in a firm’s code of ethics?
- A strong ethical culture will produce more trustworthy individuals as a consequence. It will allow workers to be more productive as they will not have to worry about potential unethical behaviors from peers. It will allow managers to focus on bigger actions rather than in situations that should not worry higher ups. An HR department can help fostering that culture by installing a code of ethics withing the organization and ensuring employees are buying into that culture.
- Corporate Social Responsibility is the behavior of corporations of serving and protecting interests that might not be the exact same ones as the corporation’s. Those behaviors are according to the necessities of society and not necessarily having productivity and profitability as a priority. The responsibilities of CSR can be described as Discretionary, Ethical, Legal, and Economic, and are determined by the top executives of the organization in terms of what type of approach the company will have regarding CSR. The main arguments pro CSR are that each company has a responsibility to contribute positively with society. On the other hand, the arguments against CSR are that businesses should focus on increasing profit and that will be their biggest contribution to society.
- A code of ethics is extremely important for any organization as it states the values adopted by the company, explains the types of behavior that are expected from employees, establishes rules and is a critical part of the corporate culture of the organization.
References
Martocchio, J. J., &Mondy, R. W. (2019). Human Resource Management. Pearson.
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