The importance of ethics for employees

There is a lot of difference in opinion when it comes to the topic of ethics in business.

A large majority of companies believe that implementing ethics in a firm’s business is a costly practice and these firms often fail to see the added value of ethics. Velasquez for example came up with three objections against bringing ethics into business (Velasquez, 2001). However, these three objections can easily be refuted since ethics does play an important role in business.

Chryssides and Kaler wrote an article about the advantages of ethics in business. They made a distinction between the ethically active, ethically passive and the unethical business. In their findings, it is the ethically active business that earns ‘moral credit’ and as a result it enjoys competitive advantage denied even to the ethically passive business (Chryssides & Kaler, 1993). This mainly is the result of the overlap between the business discourse and morality. In addition, Dubbink & van Liederkerke (2010) state the following: “not integrating morality and law in your business decisions is costly, even from a pure business point of view”.

That business ethics is important for ‘good business’ can also be indicated by the background articles. In this article, it is stated that of every five employees, one employee quits because of an ethical dilemma. As employees are of great importance to a firm, it is imperative that these issues are solved. In order to do this, it is important that companies develop a code of conduct that is based on ethics. Consequently, the probability of employees encountering these issues will decrease and employees will become more satisfied.

It may not always be the case in the short term, but in the long term the statement ‘ethics pays’ seems to be true.

Background article.
Background article 2.