Integrity or Compliance Based Ethics: Which Is Better for Today’s Business?

Abstract

A firm and a rigorous ethics program are essential in business today. Consumers demand that the companies that they do business with be ethical. Compliance and integrity based ethics programs are the leading pragmatic approaches to ethics used in today’s business environment. Reviewing each of these programs individually and then comparing and contrasting them and finally evaluating them as a synthesized program is a useful form of analysis. By separating, then comparing and subsequently integrating the best of both methods leads to the determination that firms must be able to synthesize the two theories and apply them to their business.