Introduction
Ethics represent a crucial topic of discussion for businesses and organizations expecting to improve their approach to communication with consumers and stakeholders. The current paper provides a detailed review of relevant evidence from the past two years to highlight the importance of ethics and principled decision-making. All types of for-profit and non-profit businesses and organizations were involved in reinforcing the critical role of ethics. The inclusion of up-to-date evidence signified the need for continuous research on how to maintain morale and achieve positive outcomes through ethics in business and management.
MGT501 and Ethics – Management and Organizational Behavior
The general understanding of complex organizational environments often resorts to concepts that do not relate to ethics whatsoever. In the research article written by Tierens et al. (2021), this issue is discussed in detail because of the increasing occurrence of cases where organizational behavior interferes with effective management practices. In line with the researchers, there is a need for more multiple-membership data structures to be developed. Therefore, the authors of the research project emphasized the importance of estimations made by managers and the use of statistical methods, such as regression models.
Another article that can be linked to managerial ethics was written by Bryant and Merritt (2021), who considered all of the elements of unethical pro-organizational behavior to reach a verdict on the overall effectiveness of corporate ethics. They found that many employees are entitled to the need to help their supervisors without paying attention to the potential outcomes of their actions for other stakeholders or clients. The existing constraints of unethical behavior were considered by the authors of the article to propose an improved approach to bystander interventions and encourage ethical decisions among managers and employees (Bryant & Merritt, 2021). Therefore, multiple-membership data structures and additional monitoring could redirect the organization toward ethical decision-making.
BUS520 and Ethics – Business Analytics and Decision-Making
The ideas of business analytics and decision-making were covered in rich detail in the research article written by Wang et al. (2020). They took on the notion of cloud computing and explained how technologies could improve business processes and facilitate the procedure of data analytics as well. They also proposed a research model that could make business analytics much more secure and support the modern data-driven culture. The researchers collected additional data from more than 300 enterprises to test their assumptions and see how cloud computing could enhance decision-making (Wang et al., 2020). The key approach supported by the authors was to continue developing cloud computing management and look into business analytics for potential improvements.
At the same time, analytics-based decision-making was covered by Akter et al. (2019). Their tactic of researching business analytics was slightly different from Wang et al. (2020) because they took on the big data framework and argued that enterprises have to move past intuitive decision-making and focus on larger data collection initiatives. Akter et al. (2019) also found that many organizations stay away from business analytics due to the inability to overcome their fear of replacing existing practices and beliefs with something more up-to-date. This shows how business analytics actually transformed the global environment and paved the way for even more crucial innovations.
BUS530 and Ethics – Managerial Economics
The concept of managerial economics was closely investigated in numerous research articles recently. Nevertheless, Fleischman et al.’s (2019) article was picked because they managed to include the notion of ethics in the discussion and develop a series of crucial suppositions. For instance, they took on the idea that there are potential ethical costs associated with any intraorganizational decision since managerial perspectives often differ diametrically, depending on the manager’s personality. The quasi-experimental setting deployed by Fleischman et al. (2019) allowed them to test the professional work experiences of numerous respondents in an attempt to model business cases where ethical behavior would be required. It was indicated by the researchers that goal-induced behaviors had the most positive effect on the organization.
Speaking of managerial economics, it may be essential to report on the issue of ethical dilemmas that could arise when coping with corporate social responsibility conundrums. For instance, Cho and Lee (2019) viewed the problem from the point where managerial incentives could be mediated by economic capacity. In such cases, the role of managers can be described as central because their responsibility would be to build upon existing evidence and incorporate motivational factors in their interventions. Cho and Lee (2019) developed a new instrument to test managerial efficiency and see how corporate social responsibility could be maintained to protect managerial economics. This would also create room for positive relationships between stakeholders and managers in the long run.
ACC501 and Ethics – Accounting for Decision-Making
Another area of ethical decision-making that has to be considered when talking about businesses and organizations is the importance of accounting activities. Baud et al. (2021) reviewed accounting for decision-making from the perspective where they took on the importance of specific obligations and associated them with the need to follow regulations to attain positive business outcomes. The logic behind these activities revolves around the idea that adequate reporting could facilitate decision-making initiatives and improve collaborative efforts between employers, workers, stakeholders, and consumers.
A similar issue was also reviewed in the article written by Valentine and Godkin (2019), as they focused on organizational whistleblowing and its impact on accounting. They discussed the notion of moral intensity as one of the key contributors to individual perceptions of ethical dilemmas and subsequent decisions. The social consensus that could be achieved through the interface of whistleblowing was also aligned against the potential consequences of unethical decision-making on the corporation. The core implication for management, in this case, is the need to monitor the ethical sensitivity of the workplace.
FIN501 and Ethics – Strategic Corporate Finance
When discussing the concept of strategic corporate finance and its association with ethics, Nwanji et al. (2019) noted that there could be numerous perceptions and behaviors affecting one’s accountability. This means that corporate governance has to be accepted by every employee and manager unit in order to work across the organization and unite workers on the basis of their loyalty and shared expectations. The importance of Nwanji et al.’s (2019) findings can be highlighted through the interface of the lack of recognition that forces many workers to behave unethically to get noticed. This is also a hint at the fact that business objectives related to strategic corporate finance cannot be viewed in separation from ethical corporate governance and relations between stakeholders.
A similar outlook was also professed by Andreicovici et al. (2021), who took on the problems of strategic corporate finance from the point of large labor dismissals. In line with their findings, shareholder value could be improved with ethical decision-making and detailed social contracts between the wider society and for-profit organizations. The researchers conducted a thorough analysis of European companies in an attempt to rationalize large labor dismissals and find at least one ethics-based explanation for deploying this type of corporate finance strategy. Organizational ethics are directly linked to financial performance due to the increasing stakeholder pressure.
MKT501 and Ethics – Strategic Marketing
The initial idea to look into when dwelling on the importance of ethics for strategic marketing is to extend the discussion on social responsibility. Not only this problem has to be addressed to ensure that the existing challenges are going to be resolved, but it is also a construct intended to aid in terms of improving organizational decision-making (Ferrell & Ferrell, 2021). For the researchers, the idea should be to implement their efforts in line with the transforming environment while taking care of consumer welfare. According to Ferrell and Ferrell (2021), the pandemic took a toll on the marketing subculture and altered the ways in which technology is utilized.
Also, strategic marketing ethics is an important issue because it requires businesses to innovate their operations while ensuring that their interventions are in line with the existing regulation. This means that a much more comprehensive framework is necessary if marketing teams expect to refine their strategy and approach stakeholders a bit differently (Laczniak & Murphy, 2019). There should be a dialog between stakeholders and the organization if managers expect to display a truly strategic style of decision-making. According to Laczniak and Murphy (2019), an organization will only have the opportunity to follow norms when ethics represent the essential value protected by the organization.
Overall Ethical Strategy
The ultimate focus should be on gathering survival data and then translating it into the format that could be processed by management units. In line with Tierens et al. (2021), this would be one of the shortest pathways to finding new solutions to existing issues. Correspondingly, Akter et al. (2019) noted that the amount of business-related evidence across the globe grows in a geometric progression. The ethical strategy would have to avoid any large labor dismissals described by Andreicovici et al. (2021) in order to overpower the history of employment of the utilitarian view of business relationships. Consistent with Valentine and Godkin (2019), the primary element of the new ethical strategy in terms of accounting would be the ability to foresee the gravity of consequences of certain decisions and apply ethical judgment to prevent any negative outcomes. A perfect example of such judgment is covered in the research article written by Baud et al. (2021), where it was presupposed that employees could be required to cooperate with governing bodies and show diligence to consumers and loyalty to the employer in order to remain professional and make prompt decisions when necessary.
Conclusion
Based on the evidence acquired and analyzed within the framework of the current paper, it may be concluded that ethical decision-making depends on a large number of factors that cannot be ignored by managers. The primary focus of any given supervisor looking to improve their administrative rigor should be access to corporate resources. Additional experience has to be gained in order to facilitate the decision-making process and aid organizations in terms of resolving the majority of dilemmas in ethically sound, evidence-based ways.
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