Search results

Martin Winterkorn had high aspirations for Volkswagen to become the world's leading automaker when he was promoted to CEO in 2007. Volkswagen lacked the technology needed to meet American emissions standards and fulfill their promise of a “clean” fuel efficient diesel engine. Instead, they chose to deceive the world, violating the law and the foundation the company's code of conduct was grounded in. This case provides an opportunity to explore corporate governance, ethical leadership, and the ethical and professional responsibilities that senior executives have to create and maintain an ethical culture. Examination of the details in the case uncover value conflicts. Examples of values included in IMA's Statement of Ethical Professional Practice are honesty, fairness, objectivity, and responsibility. IMA describes these as “overarching ethical principles.”

This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

This chapter discusses guidelines that specify the ethical standards for medical research in very poor countries in order to show how a sociological explanation of illness causation and health care access can offer some additional insight into the refinement of those guidelines. There has been considerable discussion on the proper ethical standards to apply given the context of extreme poverty and inadequate health care infrastructure that characterizes poor countries. Our analysis is intended to suggest that a sociological explanation for illness causation provides a clear justification for including the social context when specifying ethical guidelines and also clarifies the issues that must be addressed. This perspective is particularly sensitive to inequalities in health and access to health resources among medical research subjects, and therefore addresses core issues of justice and beneficence.

Research has demonstrated that ethical leadership helps to limit subordinates' workplace deviance. In this chapter, we draw on social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to further understand why ethical leadership has a preventing impact on workplace deviance. We propose that the key mechanism between ethical leadership and deviance is moral disengagement, which refers to the process of making unethical behavior morally or socially acceptable. Specifically, subordinates learn cognitively and emotionally from ethical leaders to minimize the adoption of moral disengagement. When they decrease the use of moral disengagement, subordinates are less likely to display deviant behavior.

While technical environment starts from western culture which is mainly based on Christianity, the associated ethical concern of the operation of technology can be varied depending on the sociotechnical environment and/or organizational culture. Ethical standards – irrespective of religions – can be used to govern the appropriate behaviors of employees in technical environment. Religions, on the other hand can also act as an apparatus of good ethical motivation that can guide individuals in society/environment. Different religions might use different apparatus(s) to define the good code of ethics. This chapter shows similarities in the ethical teaching dictated by different holy books (mainly Islam, Judaism, and Christianity). The reason is to generalize that religion, as an apparatus of ethics, can be a factor toward ethical behavior supporting the man-made code of ethics in organizations which can also lead to support the definition of the proposed framework ethical behaviors.

Comparison between verses from holy books shows similarities in ethical dimension between religions (mainly Islam and Christianity). After showing the similarities, this chapter proposes a framework of ethical behaviors (FEB) to measure employees’ ethical standards in specific organization where technical environment like cloud computing was used as an example in this chapter.

Verses from both holy books (Quran and Bible–inclusive of the old testament) shows similarities in ethical standards. This similarity considered as a component toward the proposed framework for ethical behaviors in organizations where religion can be an important factor in multi-national, multi-cultural type of organizations. The proposed FEB can be used to identify possible environmental factors acting as moderators while religion and family values acting as mediators toward behaving ethically within technical environment.

The proposed framework can be used as a guide to identify ethical versus unethical employees where a mechanism to measure is proposed. Religious standard concluded out of the similarity section was used as a component of this framework.

The added value of utilizing good religious-based ethical standards is that employees/IT professionals will have an internal drive (on the top of corporate ethical standards) toward ethical behavior in such environment.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relationship between law and ethics in accounting. The primary arguments of the chapter are that law and ethics have between intertwined historically, that concepts of morality and ethics have permeated law and that laws are based on ethical and religious principles. As a result, it is important for accounting students and practicing accountants to understand the close relationship between law and ethics. The chapter defines the meaning of “legal” and “ethical,” and draws distinctions between these concepts. It also discusses historical relationships between law, morality and ethics in major religious traditions. The concepts of ethics expressed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and how these concepts influenced the development of law and ethics in Western philosophy are then discussed. In particular, the ethical principles of independence, integrity and objectivity as embodied in the Code of Conduct of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) are recognizable in Aristotle’s premise, that moral virtue is situated at the mean between deficiency and excess and that ethics is oriented toward practical implementation of the good life through human rationality. The final section of the chapter discusses the application of law and ethics to accounting and in particular to the detection of management fraud.

Despite formal ethics education and ethics-related continuing professional education (CPE) requirements, professional accountants continue to play a central role in enabling corporations to make unethical business decisions and take unethical business actions. Several jurisdictions in the United States require ethics education for licensure, but often the focus is on memorizing rules and regulations, rather than on providing tools to improve the moral practice of professionals and to help them resolve ethical dilemmas. The authors analyzed recent state Certified Public Accountant (CPA) society course offerings and found much more emphasis on memorization than on ethical reasoning to satisfy State CPA CPE requirements. To improve accountants’ ethical awareness and behavior, CPE providers should stress ethical reasoning rather than merely memorizing rules. Such changes will make future and present accountants and auditors more ethically aware, and thus more likely to improve their ethical decision-making. Nonetheless, the authors suggest that effective ethics education and training should start in the classroom with help from departmental advisory councils. Ethics courses offered in accounting programs as well as those offered by CPE providers can leverage the experience of members of advisory councils to create programs that resonate with professionals and foster lifelong ethical awareness and ethical reasoning skills.

This chapter draws from the authors’ experiences with service-learning pedagogy in allied health training programs, and illustrates ways in which community-engaged teaching and learning can prepare students to become ethical healthcare practitioners. The authors infuse examples from their own courses throughout the chapter, mostly from the clinical fields of speech-language pathology, audiology, and occupational therapy. However, the chapter is applicable and generalizable to faculty from a wide scope of allied health training programs. The chapter introduces considerations for establishing campus–community partnerships in an ethical manner, as well as ways to foster student self-reflection and critical thinking through an ethical lens. Principles from the codes of ethics of various allied health professions are incorporated throughout the chapter along with examples of how each can be applied in community-based clinical experiences. Through a review of relevant literature, analysis of professional codes of ethics, case-based examples, and a step-by-step guide to course development, this chapter provides readers with a mechanism to ground their courses in professional ethics in a way that is relatable and relevant to students.