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Stakeholders’ concerns largely determine whether business actions and decisions are perceived as
ethical or unethical. When government, communities, and society become involved, what was merely an ethical issue can quickly become a legal one. Shareholders can unwittingly complicate the ethical conduct of business by demanding managers make decisions to boost short-term earnings, thus maintaining or increasing the value of their stock. A first step toward understanding business ethics is to develop ethical issue awareness; that is, to learn to identify which stakeholder issues contain an ethical component. Characteristics of the job, the corporate or local culture, and the society in which one does business can all create ethical issues. Recognizing an ethical issue is essential to understanding business ethics and therefore to create an effective ethics and compliance program that minimizes unethical behavior. Businesspeople must understand the universal moral constants of honesty, fairness, and integrity. Without embracing these concepts, running a business becomes difficult. Fairness is the quality of being just, equitable, and impartial, and overlaps with concepts of justice, equity, equality, and morality. The three fundamental elements that motivate people to be fair are equality, reciprocity, and optimization. Equality relates to how wealth is distributed between employees within a company, country, or globally; reciprocity relates to the return of favors approximately equal in value; and integrity refers to a person’s character and is made up of two basic parts, a formal relation one has to oneself and a person’s set of terminal, or enduring, values from which he or she does not deviate. An ethical issue is a problem, situation, or opportunity that requires an individual, group, or organization to choose among several actions that must be evaluated as right or wrong, ethical or unethical. By contrast, an ethical dilemma has no right or ethical solution. Abusive or intimidating behavior includes physical threats, false accusations, being annoying, profanity, insults, yelling, harshness, ignoring someone, and unreasonableness. Bribery is the practice of offering something (usually money) in order to gain an illicit advantage. A conflict of interest occurs when individuals must choose whether to advance their own interests, those of the organization, or some other group. Corporate intelligence is the collection and analysis of information on markets, technologies, customers, and competitors, as well as on socioeconomic and external political trends. There are three intelligence models: passive, tactical, and top-management. The tools of corporate intelligence are many. One tool is hacking, accomplished through systemic, remote, and physical means; another is social engineering, in which someone is tricked into revealing valuable corporate information. Other techniques include dumpster diving, whacking, and phone eavesdropping. Another ethical/legal issue is discrimination, which is illegal in the United States when it occurs on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, public-assistance status, disability, age, national origin, or veteran status. Additionally, discrimination on the basis of political opinions or affiliation with a union is defined as harassment. Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. To build workforces that reflect their customer base, many companies initiated affirmative action programs. Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it., fraud is any purposeful communication that deceives, manipulates, or conceals facts in order to create a false impression. There are several types of fraud: accounting, marketing, and consumer. An insider is any officer, director, or owner of 10 percent or more of a class of a company’s securities. There are two types of insider trading: legal and illegal. Intellectual property rights involve the legal protection of intellectual property such as music, books, and movies. Consumer advocates continue to warn consumers about new threats to their privacy
