Ethics, Responsibilities, and Sustainability

Ethics, Responsibilities, and Sustainability

Over the past few decades, the government authorities and business regulators emphasize on the need for organizations to exercise business ethics and enshrine sustainability measures in the firm’s codes of conduct. Industrialization in the developed world yielded unethical business practices including dishonesty in trade, child labor and an absence of equity and systematic procedures across the business divide.  As business people become socially aware in the late 1960s, the organizations considered business ethics as a way to boost its image. Today, many companies face ethical dilemma when making decisions on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities (Carroll et al. 6).

What are Business Ethics, Sustainability and Business Responsibilities?

Ethics is a set of disciplines that examine moral standards adopted as part of the organizational culture to effectively meet its goals while ensuring sustainability. People in the society have moral stances, beliefs, and values that should be respected by business entities. Business managers should, therefore, be aware of the existing conflicts due to ethical dilemmas (DesJardins et al. 62). As organizations embrace international trade and expand beyond the borders of a particular country, the customers, and the workforce becomes diversified. It calls for refinement of ethical codes, policies, and social responsibilities to accommodate the changes in the business environment hence ensure business sustainability.

Sustainable Value

The sustainable value concept is attainable via long-term corporate social responsibility. Today, endless environmental and social issues trigger a global crisis that affects the stability of the business environment. Resultantly, shareholders and managers are concerned with the future of the organization. Sustainable value serves as a remedy because it does not view social responsibility as an added cost and burden to the organization, but as a business opportunity to be exploited.

It is the responsibility of the organizations to address special and specified environmental and social issues to create awareness of the possible hazards. At the same time, the company gets solutions through innovation of products and voluntary services. It is hard to gain such benefits through internal ethical conduct. Most importantly, the business image and brand is improved for future profitability. Creation of products and services to attain a sustainable value demands social innovation. Social innovation involves the creation of new plans, strategies, ideas, and concepts to solve specified and existent social needs as targeted by the corporation.  Sustainability value refers to a concept that is emergent from the groundwork of a holistic value (Bansal et al. 73). Such an idea integrates the social environment with the financial objectives of organization. It also fuses the internal organizational structure and the community that the firm’s operations are based.

Talking of sustainable value, holistic value and social responsibility should focus the organization on the social environment some of the elements of a social environment include the firm’s employees, potential customers, social activists, the organizational culture, a secondary and primary set of attitudes, and societal norms.

The social environment teams up with other factors to influence the business environment. Sustainable value strategy, for instance, addresses vivid concerns on extreme economic challenges facing the nation and the planet. Global economic recessions make it difficult to fulfill CSR duties while addressing shareholder and investor needs. A Sacrifice on socially responsible behavior has to be made when the annual revenue shrinks. In light of this, an organizational management that is committed to sustainability addresses its issues using well-formulated strategies while maintaining business ethics.

In summary, business ethics can be enhanced through the incorporation of social responsibilities and improvement of the environment that the business is based. This way, the firm enhances its image hence ensuring customer loyalty. In the long run, the revenue generated will increase hence ensuring business survival.

Works Cited

Bansal, Pratima, and Mark R. DesJardine. "Business sustainability: It is about time." Strategic Organization 12.1 (2014): 70-78.

Carroll, Archie, and Ann Buchholtz. Business and society: Ethics, sustainability, and Stakeholder Management. Birchmount: Nelson Education, 2014: 1-76.

DesJardins, Joseph R., and John J. McCall. Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics. Singapore: Cengage Learning, 2014: 3-132. Print.