Publicly-listed companies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Publicly-listed companies - Essay Example Business organizations are formed and nurtured by individuals; therefore, the norms are a reflection of the character patterns of the proprietors. The acts of a defiant worker will result, depending on his/her target, lead to either productivity loss, sabotage property, show no respect for others or anti-social to colleagues. Out of the society’s desire to have and regulate ethical behaviors, jurisdictions have developed and enacted into law ethical guidelines that inform decisions. Unethical behaviors have been defined in federal law to include invasion of privacy, theft, embezzlement, fraud, price fixing and incomplete disclosures. All organizations are bound by the rules intended not only to punish, but to encourage companies to prevent violations (Zschietzschmann 25). There are three influences in ethical decision-making; intensity, moral development and ethical principles. Ethical intensity is the degree of concern people hold about ethical issues encompassing magnitude of consequences, social consensus, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, proximity of effect and concentration of effect. Ethical principles are a sum-total of long-term interests, personal virtue, religious injunctions, government regulations, utilitarian benefits, individual rights and distributive justice in guiding the process of decision-making. In enforcing and preserving ethical behavior, a company must have code of ethics that all employees must abide by whether inside or outside the workplace. The code of ethics informs, from the onset, how employees are hired to ensure that the employee personal interest conforms to that of the organization. Ethics are further transmitted through continuous training as the law is not static. When faced with an ethical issue to deci de, individual needs to identify the problem as a first step. The next step is to identify the extent of the effect it causes followed by why it came to happen. One has to explore the