{"id":778,"date":"2017-04-03T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=778"},"modified":"2017-03-27T15:16:40","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T15:16:40","slug":"mwr-pay-ethical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/making-work-real\/2017\/04\/mwr-pay-ethical\/","title":{"rendered":"MWR: Does it Pay to be Ethical?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"business<\/a>
University of Southampton Business School student, Sunny Sohelia, discusses the ethics of business<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ethics. Small word, yet it carries a tremendous weight whilst \u201cimposing pressure on all businesses\u201d today. (Webley, 2012) Was it ethical of me to choose to explore the issues surrounding the theme of \u2018Ethical\/Unethical? I will let you be the judge of that.<\/p>\n

So, without further ado, let\u2019s begin. I chose two questions of interest during the early weeks of my individual learning plan, the first being \u201cCould acting unethically actually be ethical? \u201c., the second being \u201cDoes it pay to act ethically? Or are the benefits outweighed by the costs?\u201d (Riivari and L\u00e4ms\u00e4, 2013).<\/p>\n

I began my research into these questions by first exploring how ethics has changed and evolved in business during the past 50 years. To my amazement, I found out that we are currently in \u201cthe golden age of ethical business\u201d (MacDonald 2010).\u00a0 This is not to say that ethics for business today is perfect, not by a long shot. However, we have made considerable progress compared to 50 years ago, Women\u2019s pay \u201cnear similar levels\u201d (Chapin,2016), perhaps even earning more than men would be inconceivable 50 years ago, in the business world.<\/p>\n

What happened next? Well, I started to find articles related to current trends of ethical procedures of businesses. I came across an interesting article in which, banks in India \u201cmay reward staff for working extra-long hours\u201d (Venkatesh, 2016) however, working long \u201cinhumane hours\u201d (Lawrence, 2016) is surely considered unethical? Yet, it could be seen as ethical – if workers have agreed and are willing to take the incentive.\u00a0 Perhaps more businesses today should adopt this strategy as it allows for higher employee motivation due to incentives provided.<\/p>\n

The mobile phone company Three are the perfect example of whether it pays to act ethically.\u00a0 \u201cMore than 133,000 customer accounts\u201d (BBC, 2016) were penetrated by fraudsters. Three paid millions of pounds to set up a security software to act ethical. Yet, when the software gets hacked into the company receives bad press, which damages its credibility. It makes me feel that acting ethically can sometimes build up false expectations resulting in a lose \u2013 lose situation. Making me question whether it is worth the cost?<\/p>\n

Now, it would be foolish of me to tell you that I have found a concrete answer to my questions based on my research. Yet I can tell you for a fact that challenges certainly await businesses to keep up with evolving ethical procedures (Lair,2013).\u00a0 I believe businesses today should govern their own ethical code (Goodwin. Page 25, 2001), whilst also relying on prudence from ethical cases in the past to shape their future ethical procedures. Failure to abide by certain ethics in today\u2019s civilization, can easily ruin a business\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Sunny Sohelia studies Accounting and Finance (With Placement) at Southampton Business School. The views in this article are those of the author.\u00a0This article is part of the ‘Making Our Work Real’ series.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ethics. Small word, yet it carries a tremendous weight whilst \u201cimposing pressure on all businesses\u201d today. (Webley, 2012) Was it ethical of me to choose to explore the issues surrounding the theme of \u2018Ethical\/Unethical? I will let you be the judge of that. So, without further ado, let\u2019s begin. I chose two questions of interest during the early weeks of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99259,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030568],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making-work-real","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":817,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}