Enhancing Motivation, Ethics and Values - Essay Example

The number and severity of business scandals have resulted in the need to enhance the ethics and values of today’s managers and leaders. The organization’s Code of Conduct, mission statement or values policy statements should reflect the expectations of ethical behavior from the company’s leaders. An ethical code serves not only the interests of the company, but has the broader purpose of fairness and justice towards all stakeholders associated with the company, state Kaptein & Schwartz (2007).

It is important that business leaders need to follow the requirements of the stated ethical code, and accordingly manifest their professional behavior towards all stakeholders of the company. Federal regulations concerning the disclosure of written ethical codes of the corporation need to be complied with. Many large firms such as Enron, WorldCom, and HealthSouth have been found to have been unethically managed by their coporate executive officers, corporate finance officers and other top managers, which has been the main reason for regulators to investigate the root cause of ethical failures in companies.

The lack of an ethical standard, benchmark or technique to measure the level of ethics in a company’s operations appear to have played a major role in these companies’ failures (McGraw et al, 2008). Integrity is an important element of leadership. The authors develop a theory-based model for judging a corporate leader’s integrity, by addressing questions based on what the criteria for judging are, when integrity judgments are particularly important, who the judges are. The relevant set of moral values and norms of stakeholders which affect such judgments are enabled by three components of integrity criteria: laws, codes of conduct, and informal moral values and norms.

Relevant stakeholders expect a corporate leader to abide by these ethical norms. Such an integrity judgment