Business Ethics (Corporate Responsibility)
Today's companies manage an endless stream of performance criteria. One of the slipperiest, and arguably one of the most challenging, is business ethics or Corporate Social Responsibility (Merrifield, M., 2003). Planning is specifying the goals to be achieved and deciding in advance the appropriate actions needed to achieve those goals (Bateman, 2011). Along with achieving the company’s goals, planning is also the step where companies identify ways to increase the value of its products and services for the customers, stockholders and last but not least society. In this day and age business ethics and planning are tied closely together by the availability of information and how that information allows for a greater level of transparency between individuals and a companies actions. In todays business climate, the social standards of how a company should be ran has increased greatly to the benefit of the communities that these organizations impact. Ethics impacts managers decisions in the organizing phase by brining up questions of hiring legal workers, using vendors or suppliers that have similar safety and environmental standards etc. Some organizing activities include attracting people to the organization, specifying job responsibilities, grouping jobs into work units, marshaling and allocating resources, and creating conditions so that people and things work together to achieve maximum success (Bateman, 2011). Perhaps the most important function of management in relation to business ethics is management leadership. Leading involves close day -to-day contact with people, helping to guide and inspire them toward achieving team and organizational goals (Bateman, 2011). To set standards for the way employees, suppliers and affiliates of a company implement safe and ethical procedures, a manager must lead by example, following