Moral Management in the Current Business World - Research Paper Example

?Introduction Organizations and businesses in the current 21st century are confronted with diverse challenges in spite of the advanced scientific technologies. Though technology has greatly improved efficiency of conducting business transactions, it has equally presented several challenges and key among them is business ethics. Business has been characterized by several ethical challenges for along time and the trend continues with no sign of abating in the future. Consequently, the public has developed perceptions about a given business or an organizational entity, and this continues to undermine or promote the performance of the particular organization. This paper discuses the concept of moral management in the current business world. Vogel (2005: 51) argues that the objective of management “is to offer direction, develop commitment, facilitate change and achieve results through creative, effective and responsible use of people and other resources”. Morals on the other hand deal with personal or organizational behavior or a belief regarding what is acceptable or not suitable to do or engage in. In this case, moral management in business organizations and in the society entails the deliberate engagement of people to perform particular tasks that are morally acceptable in the organization. Morals and ethical standing of an organization determines how the public perceives it (Vogel, 2005). For long period, the public gauges the moral standards of an organization using honesty and ethical elements of its management. In this regard, businesspersons are ranked differently depending of there area of specialization or engagement. Aguilar (1994) lists several business professionals that have consistently been ranked low by the public in the last four decades. These include stockbrokers, contractors, car salespersons, advertisement practitioners, insurance agents in addition to real estate agents. The moral and ethical standings of the practitioners who engage in these lines of business in the public view have lower ethical standings compared with other professions including teaching or medicine. Irrespective of the line of the business, that a person or an organization is engaged in, it is important to entrench pragmatic moral practices in order to gain public confidence in the organization that would in turn enhance its performance. In the current competitive and challenging business environment, Baron (2001) notes that customers are more aware of their rights and loyalty to a particular brand or an organization is not enough to maintain them. In view of the current highly globalized world, the issue of business ethics and morality is no longer confined in a particular geographical region. The widespread application of information technology, World Wide Web, electronic commerce, in addition to social networking sites have suddenly exposed small and large enterprises to global scrutiny and this trend underlies the importance of moral management. Similarly, the emerging technology in other aspects of human existence, such as medicine and biotechnology continues to elicit many ethical and moral issues in respect to their application, regardless of the benefits that they offer to humanity. To address these issues in view of globalization and developing technologies, it is important to look at the enduring management practices, their challenges in the business environment and how they need to change to address the merging business moral management issues. In this regard, it is important to investigate moral, immoral and amoral management in order to make a clear distinction among them. Baron (2001) argues that immoral management established the foundation of the business ethics discipline. According to Brekke and Karine (2003), unethical and immoral practices in an organization are identical. In this regard, they define immoral management as an organizational practice that not only lacks ethical principles but also in opposition to what is just or right. Therefore, immoral management is characterized by decisions, deeds and behaviors that oppose or have negative perceptions toward established moral and ethical standards. According to Vogel (2005), immoral management decisions are discordant with principles of ethics and in conflict with what is regarded as moral in the society. Vogel (2005), listed several traits of an immoral management in organizations. Firstly, immoral management is usually motivated by self-interests and hence it is egocentric or self -centered. This implies that the management is only concerned about what it gains in a given engagement. Therefore, such organizations are concerned with enhancing their profit margins and succeeding at every endeavor, regardless of how their activities affect the public or the stakeholders morally. However, businesses operate in an environment regulated by legislations and regulations in order to safeguard the interests of all stakeholders. Immoral management considers legal obligations as barriers to their business success and this causes many conflicts with the established order. Aguilar (1994) noted that business activities of immoral management are strategically founded to exploit available opportunities and taking shortcuts where necessary to attain their objectives. In this respect, many critics argue that no matter how such management is educated on ethics and moral issues, their inclination remains firmly against the established moral and ethical standards of conducting business. However, in context to the highly globalized world, this kind of management faces the risks of being overtaken by events because people across the world are more informed about their rights, as citizens and consumers. In the recent past for instance, the world has witnessed revolutions in the conservative and dictatorial Arabic regimes across the world. For long period, dictators had dominated governance in these countries, extending their rule for long periods mainly through suppressing democratic activists. The current changes in business and political world poses a real threat to the existence of immoral management and it would not be long before this form of management becomes extinct. According to Brekke and Karine (2003), amoral management holds that organization of a business or political activity is above or beyond the realm in which moral judgments are applied. This is especially common in organizations with intentional amoral management model. In this respect, amoral management is based on the opinion that the business or political world they operate in is distinct from the moral world, and hence moral standards should not relate with their business. Just like immoral management, this type of organization is on the verge of disappearance because of the intricate connection between business and morality in the world. Few professionals currently subscribe to amoral managerial system that involves compartmentalized thinking. Baron (2001) argues that amoral managers do not necessarily act with malice or without consideration to ethics, but they think that their businesses should not be alarmed with ethical issues, especially when there is remote connection between the business and the established moral standards. On the other hand, management with unintentional management model does not consider moral or ethical concerns in its strategies and decision-making (Hosmer, 2010). In most cases, these managers have good intentions; however, a greater sense of self-interests undermines the ability of discerning or perceiving ethical concerns of their decisions, actions, and behaviors. In this case, such managers are not necessarily insensitive or unconscious but they are morally ignorant and their decisions on moral issues are normally detached. However, Aguilar (1994) notes that unintentional amoral management pursues business interests with strict adherence to established laws, but do not necessarily care about the effects of their actions on other people. Unlike intentional amoral management, the number of unintentional managers are increasing in the global organizations whereby the form a growing clique of people who are not hostile to morality, but lack understanding about it. However, such managers have the capacity of developing moral judgments, but such capacity is not adequately developed in them. In this regard, it is important for organizations to develop the sense of moral obligation, moral imagination, moral identification and evaluation. These moral aspects should be integrated with managerial and ethical competence within the organization (Aguilar, 1994). Brekke and Karine (2003) noted that moral management is the prototype through which most of the research on leadership and management is directed. It is the ideal management that all organizations, educators, and business managers aspire to achieve in their ventures. In moral management the attitudes, business decisions, attitudes, behaviors, actions and polices conform to high standards of ethical behavior. In this regard, the need of implementing moral management in a given organization is to inculcate high professional standards of conduct. Moral leadership though difficult to attain is the essence of future trend in business, whereby both clients and the organization aspire to attain in order to achieve mutual benefits for all. Aguilar (1994) argues that the objective of moral management is to attain the highest level of virtues possible. The objectives of moral management is to meet the legal obligations required from an organization in order to establish and at the same time ensure that the ethical standards are met in the environment that an organization operates from. In this regard, moral management is fair and just method of conducting organizational operations. According to Aguilar (1994), the goal of moral management is attaining business objective of making profits within the confines of the law. In this case, law is considered as the minimum benchmark and a manager subscribing to this form of management strives to undertake business operations above the legal mandates. This is intended to sustain sound ethical standards and establish leadership in morality and ethics within the business context. Trends in the present and future business practices point toward moral management practices. This trend is founded on the premise that the morality is the core of every leadership. In this case, a moral manager is the analogy for understanding the thinking of the stakeholders and managing their organization. In this respect, moral management model is in congruent with the current trends in the highly globalized world, where lofty ethical standards are necessary in order to undertake commercial transactions that are ethical and in conformity with ethical requirements of all stakeholders. Although moral management might be unpopular in many illegal, lucrative and underworld business operations, the future belongs to organizations that perform in compliance with the law and are in touch with the moral considerations of all stakeholders. Presently, local and multinational organizations are cognizant of the importance of moral management and most have put in place measures of ensuring that they operate within the law and established ethics. According to Vogel (2005), morally managed organizations compete in a market environment where their corporate social performance offers product differentiation. Besides acting as consumers for their products, the public has an inclination of contributing to social causes initiated by firms with good corporate social performance and this increases the pressure of such organizations into enhancing their corporate social images. The most common method in which organization seeks to enhance their moral perception to the needs of the community is through corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Besides accomplishing their economic and legal responsibilities, it is expected of the firms to meet moral or ethical responsibilities. Baron (2001) defines ethical responsibilities as activities, policies, practices or behaviors that are anticipated by the community members from a firm, though the firm itself is not legally bound to fulfill the expectations. In this respect, businesses are expected to embrace the values that the stakeholders hold in high regard, as method of entrenching good moral management practices. The importance of corporate social responsibility has increasingly gained prominence in the modern business world and in future, it is highly likely that firms without good corporate social performance would be non-existent. Businesses have embraced the concept of corporate social responsibility with a high level of enthusiasm, but there is a negative side to this practice. One of the main shortcomings of corporate social responsibility is that it has exerted enormous pressure on politicians, business leaders and other prominent personalities into fulfilling economic and social obligations of the community. This has resulted to such professionals engaging in unethical practices in their workplaces in order to meet social demands. Conclusion Although the corporate and political worlds have spent considerable resources into ensuring that ethical practices are preserved in the workplaces, the obsession with corporate social responsibility has regrettably rejuvenated these behaviors. Consequently, the public confidence on business people and politicians has plummeted to an all time low because of high level of unethical behavior that they are engaged in to build careers, create wealth to meet their social obligations. Real integrity has been lost and people are obsessed with wrongdoing. People are more concerned with obscuring the truth and this has ruined many people’s careers and reputations in a world that is increasingly demanding transparency and accountability. References Aguilar, F. (1994). Managing corporate ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Baron, D. (2001). Private politics, corporate social responsibility and integrated strategy. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 10, 11-52. Brekke, K. & Karine, N. (2003). An economic model of moral motivation. Journal of Public Economics, 87, 27-85. Hosmer, L.R. (2010).The ethics of management. 7 edition (Revised). New York: McGraw Hill Higher Education. Vogel, D. (2005).The market for virtue: The potential and the limits of corporate social responsibility. Washington, DC: Brooking Institute. Read More