by Sunehra

Created on: March 09, 2009   Last Updated: March 24, 2009

Pursuing my second major in International Business I am presently studying a course named "Global Business Ethics" which emphasizes the importance of ethics in business. Ethics in business are increasingly growing due to some alarming factors which are a hindrance towards the normal operations, functions and goodwill of businesses.

Ethics are so much important for a business because a business needs to be aware beforehand of the unethical behaviors that are on the rise, society's evaluation of right and wrong affects its ability to achieve business goals and objectives, individual ethics are not enough: to be successful an organization must reflect an ethical corporate culture by collectively practicing ethical behaviors and business ethics helps identify ethical issues to key stakeholders.

The ethical issues which are on the rise and of which businesses need to be aware of are accounting fraud, insider trading of stocks and bonds, falsifying of organizational documents, deceptive advertisements, defective products, bribery, employee theft, dishonesty and unfairness, discrimination and sexual harassment and IT fraud. These are great obstacles for a business towards making profit because with these unethical practices on the lead businesses cannot be prosperous in the long run.

If shareholders are not paid their fair share of dividend, do you think they will invest money in the company further? Will anyone else invest in the company? No. If the original documents are falsified and accounting fraud is undertaken to show that everybody's got their fair share then these unethical practices are under covered soon. I know of a fairness cream in our sub-continent known as Fair and Lovely. When it was first launched in the market girls of all classes rushed to the market and generated giant sales volume for the product.

After a month its sales fell so low that the product made incredible losses and gradually driven out of the market. It was said to contain the chemical "Mercury" in it which burns the skin from within leaving dark scars. So the girls were left with dark scars on their faces instead of a fair complexion. This is one of the biggest examples of marketing fraud in our sub-continent.

Mothers in my country rely a lot on baby powdered milk to be a safe and nutritious food for their babies which was discovered to contain melamine in it! The high court banned all these powdered milk from entering our country which meant a huge loss for the products. Discrimination in context of a person's age, gender, religion, race, color, national origin and physical disability are a common phenomena in recruiting employees in business organizations which prioritizes on these issues more than the person's ability and expertise of performing the job. This often hinders and prevents the best talents to come out. How often do our passwords get hacked and our personal information leaked from our most trusted websites?

Then there remain the minor issues of unethical behaviors e.g. lying, misrepresenting, taking bribes and others. It is time businesses understand the hard fact that ethics comes first, profit is its logical sequence. If you can make your stakeholders believe that they are your first priority then you earn their loyalty and trust in the form of profits. They will invest more with you and thus your profits increases through ethics.

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