This book is the result of an intensive effort to contribute to the highly demanding and multilayered field of business ethics. It attempts to provide the reader with an opportunity to develop the critical principle of moral entity consideration. The aim is to understand, from a moral standpoint and through a behavioral thinking analysis, the ethical dimension of various business procedures, such as policy making, organizational development, leadership and management, business culture, and people management. These operations consist of a continuous challenge for each executive and business ethics practitioner as well as for scholars and advanced business students who want to enter the corporate world.
Developing the capacity of ethical thinking by analyzing the moral aspects of human behavior and corporate procedures is not an easy task, as decision makers have a key role in the sustainability of a business, while their moral mindset is vital for the organizational development. Indeed, it is not feasible to implement business ethics into daily work routine by trying to recall a set of common rules and practices; thus, it is important to develop a moral thinking attitude, which can lead to efficiency in terms of coping with both demanding and unprecedented challenges and dilemmas. Consequently, the purpose of this book is to outline a set of concepts concerning a plethora of corporate challenges with reference to ethical terms and practices. It provides analysis on how to ensure that the needs and requirements of both business ethics and human resources are satisfied without harming other entities of the internal or external environment of a corporation, while it examines how it is feasible to attain moral profit maximization through ethical resource exploitation.
Given that the characteristics of agents are associated with the morality of the business as an entity, corporate policies can be modified and evaluated as ethical or unethical. A corporation cannot act itself, as a legal entity, even if it is capable of exploiting automation implementation. Hence, the quality of people following the decisions is responsible for applying business ethics. As businesspeople claim, doing things right is not the same as doing the right things, and considering that we must not act against the rights of other entities, morality can be achieved without additional force only if we think about how behaviors and ethics can be discovered and analyzed on rather different organizational procedures and practices. Thus, at the end of reading this book, you will be able to efficiently develop a variety of ethical thoughts generated internally by your own enhanced code of conduct. This process is vital in terms of coping with corporate challenges and organizational development in a competitive environment. And remember, if you want to understand business ethics at a deeper and rational level, focus on people’s shadows.
Konstantinos Mantzaris
October 2020