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Business Research Ethics

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Business Research Ethics
The individual assignment for this week asked the students to find an article within the University Library that discusses unethical business research conduct that has resulted in individuals or firm being convicted, or at least tried. I have found and read a newspaper journal titled "Unethical workers and illegal acts," which is a study of workers, managers, and executives, where 48% of them admitted to unethical or illegal acts since year 1996. What unethical research behavior is involved? Out for the 1,324 people surveyed, 48% of them admitted to committing unethical or illegal acts from a list of 25 actions. These actions include, cheating on an expense account, paying or accepting kickbacks, discriminating against co-workers, trading sex for sales, secretly forging signatures, and looking the other way when environmental laws are being violated. From the list of 25 actions, these were shockingly the most common mentioned. Who were the parties involved? When one thinks about unethical business research or performance, his or her mind tends to automatically think that the violators are at the lower to entry level of the company's organizational hierarchy, but according to this study, I was amazed at the amount of upper management employees mentioned. From entry-level employees, to long time workers, managers, and even upper level executives, they all have admitted to unethical business research conduct. As I read along I learned that the reasons for committing those unethical acts were different for each level of employment. Example; lower levels of the employment hierarchy were shown to commit an unethical practice due to work pressure, personal debt, long hours, balancing work and family and fear of job security. Whereas, the higher employment hierarchy would commit unethical actions due to greed, sales quotas, bonuses,

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