The Critical Role of Human Resources
Business ethics is related to human decisions and directly connected with the standards and principles of fairness. Moral values are more than a simple element for a corporation. The ethical thinking of an individual is about to be forgotten in many cases, such as after the appearance of a financial turmoil or under the pressure of internal conflicts of interest. People in many cases tend to focus more on profits and financial returns, and less on business ethics and their moral identity. Consequently, without a universal moral environment, corporations must cope with additional challenges in terms of globalized competitiveness and international markets. Ethics is an opportunity to invest and develop the relationship between the decision-making center of an organization, its human resources, and its external environment, such as consumers, financial instruments, government, and the society in general.
Human resource management (HRM) is concerned with all business features of how human workforce is employed and efficiently managed in organizations. It covers a wide range of activities such as business ethics, corporate social responsibility, organizational development, behavior management, knowledge management, resourcing strategy, performance management, employee relations, and employee well-being. Guest (1987, 503) defined HRM as “a set of policies designed to maximize organizational integration, employee commitment, flexibility, and quality of work.” HRM is about the maximum utilization of the human factor, as it is a vital resource accounting for any organization. The role of a human resource professional is much more demanding than the replaced term of personnel management. The latter was introduced into many large companies in a form of welfare capitalism, while the transition from personnel management to strategic HRM was a vital phase in the evolution of this field (Lundy 1994). The flexibility required and the diverged challenges of modern business environment mean that practitioners must focus on many factors previously been underestimated.
Therefore, respect for the individual is critical for business sustainability and moral development, while achieving success and organizational goals through people is a constant challenge for each corporation. Human resource professionals are accused by many academics and other critics of being manipulative and even unethical, as they exploit their human workforce treating them as mere means to the final output, without considering their status and moral-related issues. Manipulation through leadership is a more complex phenomenon than just one unethical way of acting (Auvinen, et al. 2013). This can be done through a variety of manipulation tactics, such as reason, charm, regression, coercion, silent treatment, and debasement (Buss, et al. 1987). Furthermore, exploitation, as a term that can be used to underline morally objectionable behavior, means that a human or an entity exploits another individual or an entity for the prior’s interest by using unethical or even illegal practices. Thus, an organization can create a mechanistic formation as a hierarchical structure of control, authority, and communication through the implementation of an exploitation strategy to maintain a competitive advantage (Kehoe and Collins 2008).
As a good meaning term though, exploitation can be used to describe the inevitable process of organizing resources such as human capital, in order to enable their productive capabilities and create goods and services. In this sense, given an economic model that demands constant development and growth among nations, entities, and individuals, this good exploitation is not only a mandatory medium as a set of actions to achieve optimal efficiency and benefiting from resources but it is also the only alternative that corporations and individuals in general can use to achieve both organizational and personal goals. Therefore, it is not about capitalism. Wrongful exploitation such as harm, manipulation, or coercion will always exist, as it is in human’s instinct, whether you call it capitalism, socialism, communism, or any other form of political governance.
Also, there is the term of mutual exploitation, as two or more individuals or entities exploit each other simultaneously. For instance, Marx refers to capitalism as a regime of mutual exploitation where both parties exploit each other in a single transaction (Wolff 1999). In business, this sort of relationship is expressed by the production on the one hand, and the reward to the labor on the other, such as an income and the infrastructure that is required in order to make the job easier and more efficient for labor. Still, this does not mean that both parties involved will have a positive outcome, as exploitation can have both positive and negative impact on either side. However, if each party realizes the reasoning behind an exploitative relationship, they would be able to present positive outcome and fairness. Thus, exploitation under concrete conditions could be beneficial for everyone. Instead of putting negative or positive tags on how to name a production system in a community, we must realize the available methods that capital holders must develop and implement to create value, or we must consider new ways or rules of optimal production.
However, developing a moral corporation and an ethical human workforce is not an easy task or a simple procedure. Each moment an individual decides, a moral issue is to be presented. While this action may harm or benefit others, each decision must have been revised multiple times instantly before the final act. If a decision has a moral component inside the frame where it belongs, it does not mean that this precise decision is a moral one. The critical role of human resources is about thinking before an action, and this process must be implemented each time individuals proceed with a decision, especially if it is crucial for the corporation or other entities.
It is important to understand that a human being may not be able to recognize that moral issues are at stake. Knowing which behaviors are ethical and which are not in order to adapt behaviors to ethical principles is not always possible. Thus, developing moral thinking skills is more important than applying traditional methods of ethics. A corporation has competence to determine the ethical rules complied with its practices, through its decisions, structure, policies, and business culture. The human factor in corporations has the critical role of exploring, implementing, and developing these principles, as the corporation is consisted by people working together for common goals and common beliefs of the outcome. Consequently, the stronger the moral identity of an individual, the more fairness will be implemented without being affected by immoral challenges.
If the governance system underestimates the ethical dimensions of human resources, particularly in times of financial crisis or other internal or external difficulties, then the corporation will be faced with legal and social reaction. The ethical dimension of HR management is crucial, as treating human individuals with moral principles must be a process of internal drive, and not due to legal requirements. Human resources must be treated equally, in terms of employment opportunities, rewards, and learning development options. They must be concerned with well-being features and avoid treating them as mere elements of production system. They are not just a part of the business chain; on the contrary they are the core of the system without which the latter cannot operate and produce value.
Automation and machinery implementations need the human factor as well in terms of initial production design and in order to consume the goods and services formed. A complete automated environment will never dominate current business models, eliminating human presence. Human needs lead many professionals to machinery options, due to challenges such as the protection of employees against harmful practices at work like bullying, harassment, and discrimination, as well as the need for providing a working environment that protests the health and safety of employees and minimize stress. Though the business environment is either not yet ready for 100 percent machinery exploitation, or humans do not want machines to take up all the tasks, mainly when these affect other people (Mantzaris and Myloni 2019). These expectations must be considered at the start of every corporate policy, as being moral requires a set of practices to this direction.
Human Resources beyond Strategy
Having a business strategy is a must for each corporation. Strategic management is critical for the maintenance and development of an organization, while human resources can be influenced by a great strategy. In this way, they can add more value to their efficiency rates and produce better results for the corporation and themselves as well. The main objective of a strategy is to achieve defined goals, and in order to do this, business ethics and human resources are two related crucial parts of the corporate plan. Business strategy is a systemic and connected mix of strategic choices, incorporating various strategies in terms of competitiveness, HRM, structure, technology, and finance (Boxall 1996).
However, is it possible to apply one common strategy? Is it feasible to integrate a strategy as a given within people in a corporation, thus follow a predefined tactic for any organizational procedure? The answer is not just a simple yes or no. Managing a business strategy, notably considering business ethics, requires a complex framework that recognizes the needs for each procedure, during each separate period. In addition, a comprehensive strategy must consist of the capability of a corporation depending on its resources, such as human resources, infrastructure, capital, and general internal policies. In some cases, it is quite hard to exploit both your workforce and other business sources, while implementing a moral plan.
To maximize the competitive advantage and achieve organizational goals a corporation must balance its capabilities with its environment. This demonstrates that human resources as the core of corporate success must be settled in the sense of associating business strategy with individual development. Making rational decisions have a significant impact on corporation, thus reorientation of strategies with business ethics can be beneficial for both individuals and organizations as entities. Indeed, a strategy can be regarded as a set of concepts, providing answers about how we can achieve something, given the various internal and external environmental conditions and characteristics, and what we want to accomplish.
The analysis of the internal environment can begin with the exploration of the key objectives of corporate strategy. This signifies that people within the organization must cooperate in an efficient way to achieve success through the enhancement and implementation of business core values, a fair responsibility distribution system, the employee value proposition scheme in terms of attracting and retaining high-quality people, concerns on how ethics can be part of daily behavior, and what characteristics corporate policies should have to ensure the engagement of human resources in the long term. The external environment relies on competitive pressure analysis, financial circumstances and economics in terms of market developments, reward trends, and policies, globalization as a high-weighted factor that has a strong impact on almost each aspect of a corporation, employment and legislation regulations, availability of skills, and finally demographic trends.
Hence, is it feasible to set up a strategy without a strong mindset stemming from human capabilities? Is it able to avoid the transformations in both internal and external environment, thus exploiting every time the available resources without challenges? Either it proved to be successful or disastrous, human resources are beyond a corporate strategy, as the responsible entity for implementing plans in order to achieve common goals by generating added value following corporate procedures. Individuals must feel that the corporate environment is a great, inspiring, and encouraging place in which they can work being happy, with value-oriented principles, enhanced ethics, plenty of opportunities for growth and development, and getting rewards based on recognized performance.
Therefore, human resources must be treated with fairness against any other valued entities in corporation. For instance, health and safety policies and practices, as programs that are concerned to deal with protecting the workforce and the other entities affected by organizational outputs, must be a priority for corporations. The prevention of accidents and minimization of incidents that result in hazards to people and/or property is essential for setting up a sustainable corporate environment. It is unethical to prioritize business needs and prevent individuals from demanding and exploiting ill-health- or work-related accident programs. Though there are many cost-related challenges in the corporate world, human resources are beyond profits and corporate financial assets, and business strategies must emphasize the health and safety policies as the ethical core of corporate climate in order to minimize potential losses.
So, is it ethical to let workforce suffering from lifting and carrying without providing the technological equipment required for their ease? Is it ethical to let people work under conditions where materials may fall, building maintenance is poor, machinery is outdated and not working? Also, is it ethical to exposure human resources to health hazards arising from operating machines without protective equipment or push them do repetitive strain operations that cause injuries or tell them to not stop working even if there is an emergent situation such as when an individual feels bad or there is a fire?
In addition, it is not ethical to measure how many million days are lost due to work-related accidents and ill health though analytics must include them to achieve better efficiency. It is not ethical to develop financial instruments and indexes that conceptualize human resources as corporate elements that need maintenance overtime, and that it is fair and reasonable enough to substitute them at any time due to human-oriented issues that lead to decreased efficiency. Corporations must create health and safety programs and a plan to carry out inspections periodically. Organizational policies must include processes such as identification and investigation of the causes of losses, then design of sustainable and feasible plans on how to cope with safety factors, and finally conduct a comprehensive and continuous program that educates and trains people on how to behave morally and safely in the work environment. Sabotage is at least unacceptable if not punishable. Harming other entities is a moral concerned issue that is expected in environments where the human factor plays a critical role. Hence, strategies must maintain good records and statistics about past incidents, in order to identify the frequency of issues, trends, and harming behaviors of individuals.
Considering this, employee well-being is a key factor for corporate success. People must be happy and well-treated in order to be productive for the organization and themselves. The feeling of satisfaction is very difficult to achieve. Though corporate policies must be capable of offering human resources the opportunity to improve their quality of working life, in terms of being motivated to contribute the most they are able to. Corporations must be concerned about the well-being of their workforce, not only because of their socially responsible programs, but also as part of enhancing human resources with commitment to the human value, fairness, and morally acceptable practices.
Another great example of the importance of rational corporate policies is harassment issues. Specifically, sexual harassment and racism incidents have always been two of the most controversial human-related challenges, while a proactive approach to preventing and remedying harassment as a corporate policy remains attainable for employers (Bland and Stalcup 2001). In terms of sexual harassment, as a repeated and unwanted behavior of a sexual nature between two individuals, in most cases it is difficult to prove it as there are not witnesses, while the victims are often unwilling to take (legal) action to avoid any further harassment. So, either it is a man’s unethical action, or he was provoked by the behavior of the female, or the reverse is true, corporate policies must deal with the problem by implementing flexible but also strict and moral practices without preconception and discrimination. Additionally, we must make a clear distinction between actions that are harmful, and those that are acceptable by some people, but less tolerable by some other individuals. Generally, we need to be open-minded and less vulnerable to external behaviors, while we must develop and adhere to moral corporate guidelines regarding such incidents.
Human resources are beyond procedures, thus corporate policies against harassment and bullying cannot eliminate such practices just because they exist in a written form. Dealing with these issues is essential, by considering other entities and their rights, while ensuring that employees subjected to such harassment are given the opportunity to seek advice and that they can talk to someone freely and informally. These issues are quite sensitive, thus corporate policies must be aware of personal data, preferences, and personality differences. The establishment of a reporting procedure, and a comprehensive set of policies including protection of complainants and witnesses, as well as encouragement of victims to report the behavior to authorized individuals is very important.
Discipline, as a condition where individuals conduct themselves in accordance with the organization’s policies and standards of acceptable behavior, must be developed in the context of an ethical work environment, not enforced by corporate agents. The organization must treat employees in accordance with the law and common rational principles. Handling disciplinary cases is difficult, given the cultural and individual differences in the workplace. Some of the factors to consider when implementing discipline policies include the seriousness of an issue, the duration of the problem and its frequency, the nature of the issue and whether corporate expertise is enough to cope with the problem, and the degree of its impact on other individuals and entities.
People are bringing their own perspectives and qualities to the work, thus corporate policies must employ strategies that can generate numerous sub-strategies focusing at one case per time, while actions must be fair and consistent with previous decisions in similar circumstances. Propositions such as work hard, you are late, do your job, and do not care about corporate policies, the tone and language used in formal or informal communication, or even the way individuals welcome each other in the morning, as a process of genuine concern for other individuals, are moral-related issues that are beyond pure performance and corporate status. Loyalty and commitment cannot be achieved through power and pay threatening. A disciplinary action must be immediate in response, corrective rather than punitive, while a progressive discipline approach with advance warning is usually more effective than a strict one.
Thus, it is very important to think before you act and consider a variety of factors before you behave, to avoid the creation of a negative work climate that is unproductive. At the same time, practitioners must be prepared to hear other individuals, in the name of employee voice. Ensuring fairness and consistency is always the goal for a sustainable corporate environment, while debates between employees must avoid nervousness and intense conflicts. Feedback is valuable only when it is shareable, in terms of accepting one’s perceptions and thoughts, and be open to new ideas and different norms. Over the above, it is crucial to keep a history of the organization’s discipline practices and consider how similar issues have been dealt with in the past. The process of making a policy, then enhance it with external feedback and expertise, accordingly implement it in terms of corporate practice, and finally evaluate the outcomes in order to re-strategize and reform practices that were weak or difficult to understand, is vital for organizational performance and the establishment of business ethics.
Moral Thinking through Education
From the early 1970s, when most countries came out from the post war environment and finally they had the essential resources to promote a comprehensive educational system as a mandatory part of human’s life, they tried to develop educational frameworks to provide young people with a series of values and sciences, including moral education. This process is still very challenging, as each moral developer can share his or her own ethical perceptions and different points of view. The consolidation of education was not only a great start for enhancing a peaceful environment among nations, but it was a prime option for a state if the government wanted to secure a rational growth pace of its society and people. Ethics cannot only be transmitted through the family or the church, as it was believed in the past, particularly in cultures with solid religious beliefs. There is no particular batch of the content, teaching method, or configuration of students and space that will accomplish our ends in terms of moral education (Noddings 1994).
Moral development and ethics have always been a very important part of education. However, since the widespread of the value of learning, most people were not able to recognize the significance of education toward human behavior and interpersonal skills, which is still an issue in some cases. Regularly, people do not encounter moral principles and ethical behavior consideration in their formal education. Hence, lacking the necessary and crucial educational background for business ethics, they cannot implement this concept on their daily routine, making for an organization more difficult to develop a sustainable and creative business culture. Globalization has created an environment in which education is critical for everyone, as this internationalized corporate world involves linkages between local, regional, national, and global scales of economic, political, social, and environmental issues. The speed of this process is associated with additional challenges for individuals, considering that business ethics must be reoriented each time an innovation and new knowledge emerges.
This implies that the consequences of interventions cannot just be analyzed under a theoretical base. But they must be conceptualized into new forms of training needs. In principle, technology and globalization offer an unprecedented stream of knowledge, enabling the potential of widespread education through common rules and corporate policy requests, though it could lead to the elimination of some local characteristics. The richness of training dimensions leads many practitioners to reevaluate the need for additional and lifelong training through all corporate procedures. Given that time management is crucial for everyone, moral thinking through education must be developed in such a way that the learner can develop his or her own ethical principles internally, without the need to apply guidelines.
The process of the internal moral entity consideration starts with a core force about implementing business ethics. An individual cannot be able to apply ethics because he or she must do it, or after a short time of attending educational programs. Academicians and mentors cannot transfer the ability of moral thinking through a single knowledge lecture or lesson, even if they are field experts. They do not have the ability to motivate learner’s moral instinct, not because they do not have the knowledge to do so, but due to difficulties of individual learning level, when the training contains sensitive concerns, such as ethics and values. You cannot teach someone how to implement business ethics. Instead, you can initiate an individual to the concept of moral thinking.
Furthermore, education must consider globalization as a major influencing factor to its fundamentals. Training policy must identify global assignments, cross-cultural needs and requirements, local characteristics, and thus develop a program that covers both general and specific cultural orientations. Hence, knowledge management is crucial for developing rational corporate policies, as organizations that do not practice knowledge management can record a competitive disadvantage. Knowledge management is the systematic underpinning, observation, instrumentation, and optimization of the corporation’s knowledge economies (Demarest 1997), or in other words a process of capturing, organizing, and storing information and experiences of individuals, and making it available to others. Also, the motivation for learning must be strong enough in order to achieve knowledge management optimization. This suggests that whether an individual is motivated by expectations or goals, corporate policies must support educational and training programs in terms of motivating people to self-development. Thus, an individual can be motivated by expecting moral behaviors and a fair role and reward feedback on achieving something desirable for him or her, and by setting morally achievable goals that enhance individual contribution.
Educational systems must be followed by post-hoc actions such as knowledge capturing, documenting, storing, sharing, transferring, and reevaluating of information. Knowledge is multi-faceted and complex, situated and abstract, implicit and explicit, distributed and individual, developing and static, verbal and encoded, and an active process that is mediated, provisional, pragmatic, and contested (Blackler 1995). Explicit knowledge can be recorded and held in databases, while individuals are the primary repositories of tacit knowledge (Haldin-Herrgard 2000). This type of knowledge is obtained by internal individual processes. We need education and lifelong learning; however, a part of knowledge cannot be reached and trained in closed doors. It is not possible to teach an individual to have talent or experiences. The gaining of experiences could be done at a mind level, only if the individual is reasonably capable of leveraging knowledge in combination with creating multidimensional intellectual environments through his or her mind capacity. This process though is quite demanding, thus only a small fraction of people can cultivate.
Moral thinking must be an internal process that has been emancipated from principles and rules for action in terms of coping with demanding and unprecedented challenges. Education must provide a wide and diversified portfolio of knowledge, creating a theoretical background useful to understand the change and environmental variables. Due to difficulties in sharing tacit knowledge, business ethics must be written in the context of a code of ethics and be shared through various communication channels between individuals. Personal beliefs and perceptions, in most cases, prevent people from accepting ethics and knowledge without questioning about them or building doubts about their reliability. There is no common practice to force someone to believe and to adopt knowledge. If an individual does not want to follow a script, then no one can change his or her mind and perceptions. However, through people-oriented tools, it is possible to achieve growth of ethic awareness of other parties.
If you treat other people as the medium to accomplish organizational goals, making them pieces of the mechanism, and not part of business culture, ethics cannot be achieved. Instead, moral thinking must be developed at a personalized level, with strategic knowledge inputs, thus generating moral perceptions and behaviors. Also, everyone in the corporation must be encouraged and given the opportunity to develop their ethical skills. Everyone must be able to maximize their capacity of moral thinking. Practitioners should promote a learning culture and education as a priority for each one of the individuals in order to success. Corporate policies must include recognition and rewards for those who have the willingness to keep on learning and find ways to motive the other individuals that are not interested in education, presenting a stable or declining direction to their knowledge levels.
Learning, as a process of constructing new capabilities, skills, and knowledge, is essential for both individuals and the corporation. Either it is an individual’s willingness to learn more or the organization requires new skills, both terms referring to one common goal, that of making an individual’s mind and capabilities better with various methods, in order to achieve personal and team goals. Thus, the encouragement of learning is limitless. Indeed, it is a lifelong process that consists of valuable resources for all entities. For instance, a workplace can be a learning environment. This highlights that a variety of on-the-job training is happening, while the individual must absorb various environmental factors in order to increase performance and mental level.
People behave considering their perceptions, needs, and expectations of other entities such as a corporation or their colleagues. Education as a set of predefined or unsettled norms cannot cope with real-time behaviors universally. Norms are the unwritten rules of behaviors that are not formed as policies or procedures. Hence, individuals must extend their educational and learning capacity in order to develop their internal driving forces of morality, through structured plans on what they need to be trained, what they must learn to be efficient, what the corporation needs by its human resources, and how training and learning is possible, in terms of finding the right educational methods.
Some people can learn with the use of e-learning and web-based technologies through their computers and personal devices. Other people prefer traditional educational methods, such as a classroom, and someone to guide them as a coach or mentor, in shorter or longer educational segments. Mentors provide people with specific advice and guide them with learning programs and on how to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills, not only to individuals that are in the early stages of their careers, but to people that need an advice on dealing with any kind of problem such as technical, administrative, or even at a personal level, anytime throughout their career life. Other people need to have an experience or to simulate a situation in order to learn new things. Many individuals need to be part of a team to concentrate, while others need to stay alone and explore things out for themselves, else they are getting distracted. Also, there is a minor category of individuals that can make their own educational paths through self-directed learning techniques. This self-initiated process is efficient for individuals that are capable of planning what knowledge they need, as if they overestimate their capabilities then this self-plan could end up with negative results.
It is important to mention that a combined method as blended learning may could be the best learning plan, as both education and experience are essential. However, education alone cannot ensure practicality under all circumstances and operations, while experience may be repeated many times, and thus be unable to offer development. In other words, an individual working for a corporation at a similar position doing comparable tasks for many years is stable, as this could be analyzed as the same little experience, repeated many times through years of work. Therefore, education and learning in general is important, due to its continuous level of development in the context of a variety of factors such as technological, financial, social, and environmental progression.
In any case, whatever the education channel that is preferable, moral thinking is taking place with the consideration of the impact and consequences that an action might have to other entities. This self-motivated consideration is essential for applying business ethics, thus contributing to the creation of a moral corporate culture. Furthermore, corporations must develop policies that analyze the perceptions and behaviors of individuals, and then relate them to corporate development needs, set goals, prepare a rational action plan, and finally implement a comprehensive strategy as it was established. The development of a corporation is important, but this can only be efficient through developing people. So, practitioners are responsible for unveiling these attributes and improving operational flexibility by extending the range of skills needed as a successful and sustainable corporation needs a lot more than just human workers who get the work done.
Having strong education and training programs is not enough. A corporation must ensure through its policies and procedures that individuals have applied their learning on their work environment and operations. The impact of changes in their behavior within business operations could be extremely effective for any business function. Additionally, the corporation must benefit from learning programs, in the event of corporate growth, performance, and sustainability. Time should be allowed for the change in behavior to take place, as moral thinking and generally learning a new skill is usually difficult to adopt instantly.
Learning and education do not consist of a race between people. Individuals are unique, and they have different intellectual levels and understanding capabilities, thus it is not fair to push everyone with the same pressure level. Some people may satisfy business needs faster than other individuals. The learning process is related to several factors, such as the internal drive to learn, the individual’s personality, and the responsiveness level, in the context of developing appropriate actions that lead to effective behaviors and performance. Additionally, organizational learning capability can be defined as processes which enable flow of knowledge (Deshpande 2012). So, claiming an ethical identity is impossible to be achieved without proper actions. Behaving morally for yourself, while your activity is unethical for others is not the right to do either.
Summarizing, moral thinking through education is a reachable goal, and corporate policies must consider various critical factors. First and most importantly, people have emotions. As a result, emotional respect, engagement, and management are crucial for the implementation of corporate policies. Many times, emotions limit our learning pace, while this process can have a negative impact on what we have learned already. A strong and powerful experience, or an accident, a quote or a sentence on a scientific book can alter our points of view on many dimensions. This can create new emotions and thoughts on the same circumstances, while it can modify our thinking process substantially. Indeed, we can learn better in stimulating environments and by interaction, while our brain needs time to reflect to embed the learning. Furthermore, the aging of our brain is very important, and it needs additional attention. We cannot maintain our learning abilities and maximum learning pace throughout life, as “advancing age is paralleled by a reduction of the ability to acquire new skills, impacting social and professional life” (Zimerman, et al. 2012, 10).
In the past, most people thought that education is for young people only. Then, business needs for additional skills since the first industrial revolution led people to supplementary education, while in recent decades, the concept and process of lifelong learning was developed and altered most people’s perceptions. At this point, it is essential to mention that moral education is very challenging to teach, as educators must be capable to distinguish their personal moral values from the educational process. This means that a learner must have the opportunity to freely develop his or her moral thinking capacity and skills by responding to the received information over ethics, and form an individual concept on how to think and behave ethically. Educational systems must provide people with multidimensional schemes and approaches that enable personal interventionism. This is particularly critical for practitioners and individuals who are going to be committed to serving organizational interests.
Business ethics is not simply a set of moral behaviors documented in order to be a practical guide on how to behave ethically. Business ethics as a set of values and moral principles have also an educational purpose. In the context of rational corporate policies, business ethics must be able to provide a vision, and influence individuals on how to behave ethically against their internal force of egoism and the feeling that serving self-interest is the only purpose of a human being. Moreover, knowing that you carried out an unethical action against another individual must not be a pleasant feeling. Education and learning channels such as part of corporate policies must be able to promote the development of moral thinking, in a way that the individual cannot internally accept behaving unethically, notably when the action and its consequences involve other entities.
The meaning of value considers the regard that something is held to deserve. The importance and usefulness of a material, the monetary worth, and the principles of behavior of an individual entail that value is fundamentally a crucial element of comparing two or more conditions. Furthermore, it is a vital part of the evaluation process, while it creates an environment of motivation, and enables individual willingness to generate value. Additionally, ethics, as an important branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles and governs individual behavior, is superior to law. The latter is formed by the government as a minimum standard for individuals and entities in terms of implementing legal policies and making decisions that follow regulation. However, being ethical implies that an individual considers significantly more values than just the minimum required in order to be legally acceptable.
One of the most widespread questions concerning ethics is about what money can buy, and what cannot be negatively affected by monetary value. We can recognize that in practice, in some cases, money-driven individuals can be satisfied with monetary benefits, and they can put aside ethics and their moral values given the condition that they are secured from being caught, or that their action is at least legally aligned. This is critical, as a legal activity, even if it not ethical, can be used as an excuse for third-party entities or in order to satisfy internal awareness and instinct motivation. However, we must seek to approach what money can buy without involving emotions and moral viewpoints during this process. First, the commitment to value in terms of money means that an individual’s integrity can be flexible enough in order to be inspired and influenced by money forces. Thus, the level of respect that individuals feel can be altered, as an attempt to exploit any given opportunity and take advantage of the monetary benefits. Trust can be modified as well, because those individuals will consider that an action that can generate money is the one that has to be implemented.
Therefore, people relations can be money-oriented, and individuals can change their trust levels toward other individuals, depending on money-driven values, aiming for more profit. The one who will gain his or her trust is the individual who will provide more money. This simple rule in the money world can generate a plethora of unethical activities because the use of money to gain the advantage of resources and individuals is the easiest method to exploit their vulnerable behavior. Accordingly, considering the critical role of human resources in business, commitment to money can be both a valuable and a disastrous part of daily operations. Corporations are established in order to deliver products and services as a mean to generate profit, as an essential part of a set of values including work conditions and people engagement. Thus, individuals that are committed to make money, can be useful in business operations such as negotiations with suppliers or consumers, and in terms of the structure of corporate monetary policies. Their extended mindset capacity in the context of creativity as an attempt to explore methods on how to generate value can be very important for organizational innovation and development, and vital for corporate sustainability.
However, their willingness to gain more, without moral entity consideration as their primary principle of thinking on decision making, can create the conditions of a stressful work environment, in which their monetary interests must be satisfied with practices that are against other individuals or even the organization they work in. Having a solid work ethic in corporations generating a huge amount of money and value in general is critical against bribery, fraud, and extortion. There are undoubtedly several methods for violating morals and standards of doing business. At the same time, you cannot buy the honesty of an individual, so it is possible to be deceived in the name of money. Although a business can adopt policies opposed to such practices, human instinct to serve his or her own interests means that it is almost impossible to control the overall of such behavior in corporations.
Another important statement is that some people claim that money cannot buy someone’s ideas. However, in practice, money can not only buy ideas but it can exploit them with unethical practices as well. For instance, a startup company is a legal way to translate an idea into the corporate world in order to develop scalable business models. Though, there are two considerable approaches on this sort of business. On the one hand, some entrepreneurs name a new corporation as a startup one, just for exploiting capital and funding programs promoted for innovative activity because a startup must be primarily characterized by its innovative operational mission. Thus, people exploit this wave of investment on innovative ideas in order to serve their individual interests, even though the established business does not present any innovative characteristics at all. Additionally, they do not have any intentions to grow the startup beyond the initial scheme, so they attempt to attract investments in the short term without securing long-term and large-scale business sustainability.
On the other side, some people build and develop their startup models considering business ethics, so they put additional effort to secure sustainability and growth in the long run. Also, they develop ideas into practical goods and services, and they consider the feedback in order to validate that they follow a critical path of maximizing value, with accuracy, focus, and knowledge gain. But, when the commitment to value substitute ethics with money-driven forces, this could be disastrous for the business models developed. This means that larger corporations may acquire smaller companies, such as startup ones, in order to exploit their business model. Though this process confirms that the mission of a startup is accomplished, it can have a negative impact as well. Some entrepreneurs buy startups and in general other smaller companies and their ideas, patents, concepts, and other copyrighted material because they want to prevent the development of such goods and services in the name of profit and personal interest. For instance, it is unethical but also profitable to prevent the development of a business model that makes the production of a good or service more efficient by decreasing its cost, as it could generate less profit due to competition forces. Particularly, entrepreneurs would be willing to eliminate such models, in order to prevent of being pressured to decrease the price of their goods and services due to competition or change their business model and operations, while other businesses cannot exploit those ideas due to the rights that the first has acquired.
The process of silencing ideas satisfies individual interest; however, it prevents social growth and well-being given the available resources. Hence, it is not about what money can buy and whether an individual is capable of exploiting someone’s vulnerability, but it is about how people can develop their mindset capacity in the context of ethics, and whether they can evolve a compelling character with limited fluctuations. Being rational is easy for most people in terms of serving their own interests. But, on the contrary, being ethically rational is feasible only if the condition of objectivity is achieved. Human resources can be objective if they are not influenced by personal feelings or other circumstances in considering various facts. This is a quite demanding procedure and requires concrete skills of avoiding being subjective. Thus, making objective judgment is crucial for the implementation of business ethics, while corporate policies must include objective terms as well. The commitment to value can be translated into a powerful strategic tool, however if you cannot distinguish whether you must be subjectively rational, then your commitment and loyalty levels cannot be aligned with moral principles.
Business ethics is associated with human resources, their decisions, and behaviors. Achieving success and organizational goals through people is a constant challenge for each corporation. Wrongful exploitation such as harm, manipulation, or coercion will always exist, hence practitioners must adhere to corporate policies that enable individual development and enhance the critical role of human resources. There is no universal strategy, while a comprehensive plan must consist of the development capability of a corporation depending on its resources, particularly in terms of implementing moral practices. Employee well-being is a key factor for organizational success, and corporate policies must be proactive against issues that could have negative impact on work climate, such as harassment or discipline. This includes the promotion of education as a vital practice to increase the moral mindset capacity of human resources. This is feasible through a variety of educational channels, and this process could be catalyst as an attempt to cope with the commitment to value. Money-driven individuals can be proved as a critical factor for the downturn of a corporation, and efficient business models must be developed rather than silenced.