Editorial: Overcoming unethical behaviour with virtues, ethics programs, spirituality, sustainability, and philanthropy

Citation

Rendtorff, J.D. (2023), "Editorial: Overcoming unethical behaviour with virtues, ethics programs, spirituality, sustainability, and philanthropy", International Journal of Ethics and Systems, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 677-678. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOES-11-2023-319

Welcome to this fourth issue of the International Journal of Ethics and Systems in 2023. We address different approaches to ethics, ethical and unethical leadership, spirituality, sustainability, philanthropy and some selected topics of Islam and ethics in economic systems. Looking at accounting ethics, it is interesting to see how important virtues are in accounting ethics. A study of ethics of accounting in Hong Kong suggests that classical virtue ethics from Aristotle is still very important for ethics of systems. The themes of integrity, conflicts of interests and awareness of ethical judgment are very relevant for ethics in the accounting profession who searches for more ethical sensibility. The accounting profession needs to focus on integrity, values and compliance, and it is important to have a sense of responsibility in accounting. Indeed, it is interesting that accountants require more education in ethics and virtues to fulfil their professional responsibilities.

It is also a pressing agenda to address ethics in public organizations. Research suggests increasing ethical challenges in public organizations and institutions. The flip side of ethics is here the problem of unethical behaviour. In Algeria, for example, unethical leadership is a key challenge to change administration towards ethical values to combat corruption in politics. To create an ethical culture, it is essential to mitigate corruption. To strengthen ethics in organizations, it is also important to perform ethical leadership with focus on the subjective well-being of employees as suggested by a new study of the effect of perceived ethical-philanthropic corporate social responsibility (CSR) on health-care employees in Pakistan. Looking at recent developments in Jordan, it is also possible to see how ethical leadership in combination with ethics and organizational culture and CSR helps to increase the work capacity of organizations. In the service sector, it is an indicative finding that ethical leadership improves organizational performance. Looking at factory work in Iran, research also suggests that leadership integrity can help to increase employee success because it contributes to psychological capital and psychological empowerment of employees. Ethical leadership has a moderating effect on employees who are motivated by perception of leadership integrity and ethical behaviour by their leaders. This need for ethical leadership can again be documented by research in amoral behaviour and control among bank employees in Nigeria. In the banking sector in Nigeria, there is a challenge of understanding fraud and amoral behaviour among employees. It turned out that job insecurity is closely related to fraudulent intentions among employees so that psychological insecurity at the job may be reason to commit fraud. Thus, a Nigerian study seems to confirm that ethical leadership, integrity and ethical culture in organizations can help to prevent fraudulent behaviour. In addition, ethics programmes, training and workshops with employees and ethics contribute to improve ethics awareness in organizations and contribute to motivate employees not to commit fraud in their daily work.

Maybe focus on spirituality in the workplace can contribute to making employees more engaged and increase their ethical awareness. Research in practicing spirituality in the workplace in India demonstrates that the spirituality increases engagement of teachers as workers in higher education institutions through emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence may be a mediator to increase employee engagement in the future of their workplace. We can say that this contributes to employee well-being and at the same time creates stronger ethical awareness in organizations both in the private and public sector. A study of spirituality, compassion and citizenship in education in India goes in the same direction. As a part of the spirituality of emotional intelligence, research compassion among high school teachers in the workplace indicates a positive relation between spirituality and awareness of citizenship among employees in high schools. Therefore, this research demonstrates that organizations can improve ethics and citizenship by working with spirituality to create shared value between employees and organizations in fostering organizational citizenship behaviour.

Indeed, it is necessary to relate awareness of corporate citizenship to responsibility for sustainability and sustainable development. In this context, research in green banking focuses on continuous improvement of environmental, financial and operational performance. A classical question of ethics and economics is whether improvement of ethics leads to increased economic performance. A study of green banking in Pakistan suggests that green banking is important for better financial and operational performance in banks. Green banking opens for new resources of the bank that improves organizational sustainability through eco-friendly practices.

Following up on a long tradition of research in Islamic ethics and economics, we also present studies of Islam and ethics in this issue. An interesting question is whether it is possible to combine the philanthropy and charity of waqf trust with sustainable development goals. A study from Malaysia shows that such collaboration on investment, technology and governance can create sustainable value for community that combines Waqf trust with value-creation. Accordingly, there is an opportunity for creating shared value through a Waqf-integrated income generating model. Such a model of value-creation can have importance for practitioners who work with sustainable development goals.

This approach to philanthropy and charity is a characteristic example of the role of ethics in Islamic economics. A theoretical study of the problem of economics in an Islamic perspective demonstrates the conceptual dimensions of morality in Islamic economics. Through a discursive analysis, it can be demonstrated that Islamic economic theorists have two basic approaches to economic problems, namely, descriptive and normative understandings of the aim of economic analysis. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges to develop an ethical economy of Islamic philosophy, for example, the distinction between practical economic life and ideal life according to the Quran where the religious ideals shape economic action to realize human well-being.

Thus, articles in this issue combine insights from different parts of the world (Hong Kong, Algeria, Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and India) in relation to key problems of ethics and systems, including virtues, ethical leadership, spirituality, sustainability and philanthropy. Also, in the different articles, we find different theoretical and empirical proposals to study ethics and systems. The articles combine different methodological qualitative and quantitative approaches, and the issue also contains attempts to propose comprehensive theoretical and philosophical approaches to ethics of economics. A general learning point of this issue is the importance of ethics for creating shared value and for improving economic performance. However, as demonstrated by all the articles, this economic approach to ethics cannot stand alone but must be accompanied by normative ethics to improve motivation, well-being, engagement and involvement of employees and other stakeholders in organizational development and improvement.