Aliza Racelis

Human resource management (HRM) is the effective management of people at work. Since a firm’s human resources are an important potential source of sustained competitive advantage, managing them well helps create unique competencies that differentiate products and services and, in turn, drive competitiveness (Ivancevich, 2003; Cappelli and Crocker-Hefter, 1996). This link, in principle, facilitates successful corporate performance. An increasing body of work contains the argument that there exists a positive relationship between so-called “high performance work practices” and different measures of company performance (Fey and Björkman, 2001). Such “high performance work practices” include comprehensive employee recruitment and selection procedures, incentive compensation and performance management systems, and extensive employee involvement and training. A number of studies have found a positive relationship between HRM practices and policies, and different measures of company perfor...

Organizational research in the last two decades has paid greater attention to the topic of culture as a potential key or critical lever for better understanding of organizations. Culture has drawn attention to the long-neglected, subjective, or ”soft” side, of organizational life. In functionalist thinking, culture is considered a component of an integrated social system which promotes the effectiveness of the organization and the well-being of all its stakeholders. Organizational culture refers to the assumptions, beliefs, goals, knowledge and values that are shared by organizational members. Culture represents the high-information ”ideal factors” in a system or organization that exert significant and partly independent influence on human events. When an individual is faced with an ethical dilemma, his or her value system will color the perception of the ethical ramifications of the situation. This study, then, seeks to explore and have a basic understanding of the relationship bet...

The field of Business Ethics has an important role to play in identifying and establishing ethical parameters for business activities. Ethics professors have the continued challenge of being able to deliver ethics and morality teachings in the classroom. One topic in the area of business ethics and social enterprise that has begun hogging the pages of business and social responsibility research articles is the field of ethical banking. The ethical-social nature of the mission of ethical banks makes for an interesting discussion piece and scenario for a case-based teaching of business ethics. This paper presents the case of showing ethical banks as vignette in finance and ethics classes at the University of the Philippines, aimed at making students aware that it is possible for businessmen to be socially and ethically oriented and at the same time keep in mind the need for financial sustainability. The methodology involved content analysis and tests of differences based on a survey of 141 undergraduate business students. Results show overwhelming positive response to the concept of the ethical bank. 96% of the student respondents were in admiration of the ethical raison detre of ethical banks and 93% opined that it pays to be ethical. There was no difference between male and female respondents in opining that it pays to be ethical. Overall, results corroborate the mounting evidence that there is an ever greater awareness of the ethical responsibilities of business and discernment of the form that ethics can take in specific enterprises.    

Brief description of Spanish Philosopher Leonardo Polo's "transcendental anthropology". Anthropological Transcendentals: 1) Personal co-existence, 2) Personal freedom, 3) Personal knowledge, 4) Personal Love. http://www.leonardopoloinstitute.org/journal-of-polian-studies.html

As the financial crisis of 2008-9 has continued to affect the global economy, many wonder whether the proposed solutions contribute to a more stable financial system as well as to better human behaviour. While the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) Report (2011) identified the factors essential to explaining the causes of the financial crisis as having included credit and housing bubbles, nontraditional mortgages, credit ratings and securitization, financial institutions concentrated correlated risk, leverage and liquidity risk, contagion risk, shock and panic, failure in virtue has also been very patent in the crisis, foremost of them being: excessive leverage and imprudent risk-taking, failure in fiduciary duties and in stewardship, as well as greed, lack of moderation, and fraud. The lens of virtue theory is, thus, necessary to analyze and explore the financial crisis' origins and remedies. There exist ways of measuring such virtuousness or lack thereof among managers...

This paper is an exploratory attempt at generating a virtue ethics scale for managers from the Philippines, using the initial listing of Shanahan and Hyman (2003). The survey questionnaire consisting of 34 virtues was administered to a sample of 141 business and finance postgraduate students who are managers in the companies in Philippines. Based on the factor analysis of the responses to the items on the virtues questionnaire, the following were the resulting virtue or trait factors: (1) Care and concern, (2) Competence, (3) Ambition, and (4) Superiority. The four resulting virtue factors compare more or less with the virtue listings generated in the literature: "Care and concern" is analogous to "empathy" and "respect"; and "competence" seems akin to "integrity", "trust", and "reliability" in the literature. The results corroborate evidence in the Virtue Ethics literature that proposes the virtue theory as an im...

There is a growing consensus among a broad spectrum of scholars that the scope and magnitude of the environmental problems we face threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems. In response, a special UN commission was established to address the rapid deterioration of the human and ecological environments, which called for a global, long-term effort to achieve environmentally and socially sustainable development. As this ‘ecological sensitivity’ was growing, on the accounting and investment side of business was growing a huge effort and literature in such matters as “triple bottom line” and “socially responsible investment”(SRI) in order to adjudge properly whether indeed the concern for people and the environment was authentic. Much attention has been devoted to SRI, which refers to ethical investments, responsible investments, sustainable investments, and any other investment process that combines investors’ financial objectives with their concerns about environmental, s...

Entrepreneurship is increasingly being recognized as a significant conduit for bringing about a transformation towards sustainable products and processes. Emerging literature on ethical entrepreneurship has developed a new model of entrepreneurship as a calling to endow resources with new value; it is the ethical aspect that would make such a construct authentic sustainable entrepreneurship. One of the first steps in entrepreneurial training and maturity in the area of sustainability is to develop models for sustainability communication and reporting. This article presents a revised assessment model for sustainable entrepreneurship in Asia, which consists of five domains, namely: economic, social, ecological, cultural, and ethical. The insistence on the inclusion of ethics is motivated by the fact that it is the obligation of businesses to be accountable for their environment and for their stakeholders in such a way that ethics forms one of the legs on which entrepreneurship, if it ...

Brief description of Spanish Philosopher Leonardo Polo's "transcendental anthropology". Anthropological Transcendentals: 1) Personal co-existence, 2) Personal freedom, 3) Personal knowledge, 4) Personal Love. http://www.leonardopoloinstitute.org/journal-of-polian-studies.html

From an anthropological and ethical perspective, the Spanish philosopher Leonardo Polo always defended the thesis that the task of the teacher is the activity that is most directly involved with the human being. In this vision, the classroom is perceived as an exceptional space in which one can grow into a better human person and, hence, the educational task requires that teachers fall in love with their mission, and that they be firmly convinced of the transcendence of their role. Thus, what is required of the teacher is not only expertise in his/her respective subject matter, but above all, that he/she be formed in such a way as to discover and value the potentialities and capabilities in each student in order to enable their personal growth. In this view, the student is thus taught to project such potentials into the future so that he/she is enabled to discern the transcendence of every action and conduct. Therefore, this educational philosophy views the educational task as a simultaneous learning–on the part of both teacher and student–to grow into better human beings, with special emphasis on interior growth. And since there is no limit to interior growth, the good use of time by the teacher is of utmost importance for human life. Ethics, then, comes to the aid of the educator in the task of ensuring that everybody–teacher and learner alike–grows. On the basis of the ramifications of this educational philosophy of Leonardo Polo, this paper shall draw implications for teachers' self-reflection. It shall likewise draw up recommendations for classroom management as well as for the guidance that teachers are to give to pupils for their integral human development.