Morals in business organizations: An approach based on strategic value and strength for business management

Abstract

In the last decades, the topic of business ethics has attracted great interest at the academic and professional levels. Nowadays business ethics is being increasingly implemented as a necessary discipline in universities' study plans on business management. Moreover, its importance is also evident according to the worldwide increase of organizations and/or institutions that have implemented ethics systems. However, some approaches thoroughly do not consider the importance and the need of an ethical behaviour and are still guiding the actions and the way of thinking of many academics and professionals led to consider that the only responsibility of business is limited just to profit maximization. After analyzing and debating the postulates of this line of thought, this paper concludes that the companies bear the responsibility of behaving ethically. This responsibility does not exclusively imply serving and being fair to its shareholders as the only actors to care about. Its fulfilment requires the recognition of other actors in scene, its stakeholders, to constitute a consistent basis on which companies can satisfactorily operate in the market. The implementation of an ethical management system (from now on EMS) can contribute to the generation of an ethical culture and to the improvement of the moral quality of the whole organization. As a consequence, together with the achievement of the desired Top Managers "best place to work", the corporate reputation related to its stakeholders can be improved redounding in the value creation for the company.