How Corporate Culture Shapes Ethical Actions: An In-depth Analysis

This essay examines the significant impact of corporate culture on ethical actions within business organizations. It defines corporate culture and its role in shaping ethical standards, highlighting how management, employee perspectives, and relationships with stakeholders influence ethical behavior. The essay discusses the importance of ethical considerations in consumer relations and the potential for corporate culture to either promote or undermine ethical practices. Using the Enron scandal as a prime example, the essay illustrates how a flawed corporate culture can lead to unethical decisions and devastating consequences. Additionally, it briefly compares the corporate cultures of Google and Twitter to showcase contrasting approaches. The essay concludes by emphasizing the critical role of corporate managers in upholding social commitments and ensuring ethical decision-making to foster positive outcomes and maintain societal trust. Desklib offers a range of similar essays and solved assignments for students.

Business Ethics
Enron corporation

Introduction
– Corporate culture is also known as organizational culture. Corporate culture comprises of a set of
different functionalities such as, beliefs, norms, values, principles, goals and set of behaviors etcetera.
– All these characters helps the organization to operate in a fulfilling way along with that it also
includes different problem solving methods with the help of corporate members. Corporate culture
influence ethical actions in an organization in many different ways (Crane and Matten, 2016).
– The enactment and execution of the ethical values can really help the organization and specially the
member of the organization in order to guide them properly in many different ways.

Continued
– In any organization, ethical actions are very important and decided according to the organization environment. If the corporal
culture is strong then the ethical standards automatically increases of any organization.
– If the corporate culture is not proper or ineffective then it will also result into unethical behavior of the organization.
– Ethics can be also called as one of the internal part or department of any organization.
– The ethics bar is not only set by the founder of the organization but by the employees and others as well.

Factors of corporate culture that affect the actions
of business organization
– If any employee’s perspective is considered then,
– Management is responsible for taking all the actions. For instance the whole working environment, including all the
daily chores, functionalities, activities etcetera are handled and shaped by the management.
– Therefore if the corporate culture members are not good at what they do then they can easily put a bad impact on their
subordinates and create an environment of unethical behavior (Hartman, DesJardins and MacDonald, 2014).

To be continued..
– Corporate culture should make sure that the ethical action should be fair and considerate by everyone. If the corporate culture
management fails to uphold the ethical rights then there will be several consequences which can affect the working environment
and the morale of the employees.
– Organizations who work at a smaller level need to be in touch with the business customers to maintain a healthy relationship
between the employees and the business customers (Hoffman, W.M., Frederick, R.E. and Schwartz, 2014).
– These business customers are suppliers, dealers and bankers etc.
– So in order to maintain a good relationship with these third parties it becomes very important for the corporate cultural
members to decide the ethics in such a way that can be helpful for this relationship.

Continued
– Therefore it should not be taken lightly and the ethical actions should be laid out in that way only so
that there will not be much issues.
– Ethics actions regarding the consumers can also be affected by the corporate culture. The most
important part of any business is the consumers because without them, it gets very hard to imagine
the growth of the business.
– The major concern is to sell the goods at a fair share of price so that the consumers will be satisfied
(Shaw and Barry, 2015).

continued
– Therefore such companies or organizations are almost on the verge of losing customers.
– Altogether it is a very unethical action which is a consequence of poor working of corporate culture.
– This can really be harmful for the company and even ruin the brand name because of the bad publicity. Therefore the
impact of corporate culture can really affect such ethical actions regarding this matter (Thorn, 2016).
– In any organization it becomes very necessary to handle the concerns and issues of the consumers in a very ethical
manner or otherwise there might be severe consequences that can also affect the working of the organization.

Continued
– Organizations can be sometimes unaware of the ethical policies and because of that there might be a negative influence
on the ethical action.
– As a result of that the organization’s corporate culture can enforce unethical actions.
– If the corporate members are aware of the situation then they can also make or enforce new policies that will represent
the ethical actions in a positive way (Trevino and Nelson, 2016).

continued
– Society also plays a major role in affecting the decisions of the corporate culture of the organization that eventually
affects the decision of the ethical practices.
– Society includes all those factors which interact with each other such as, workers, citizens, community members and
other institutions that are present in the community.
– All these should be respected in each and every manner so that the business follows a great path for the better
fulfillment of the expectations in every way.

continued
– The responsibility of the corporate managers is to deliver the proper statement to the public stating the fact regarding their role in
the social commitment.
– If the corporate managers fail to deliver the statement then the ethical action will look negative. This is how the ethical actions
are affected by the corporate culture in this field.
– To overcome the issue and make the ethical action look positive, the managers can make some changes in the policies and adopt
new ways of social commitment in order to fulfill the promises.

Example
– Making good ethical decisions depend on the corporate decisions therefore it is very necessary to take the decisions in
an ethical manner (Robinson and Dowson, 2017).
– Otherwise there can be several consequences.
– To describe the impact of corporate culture on the ethical action in a company, and how corporate culture can dominate
the ethical action, Enron scandal is the best example.
– In December 2001, Enron Corporation went bankrupt along with that it was also cited as one of the biggest failure in
audit in America (Segal 2018).
– Enron was an energy company present in Houston in Texas.

Continued
– Due to unethical use of practices they mis-presented all the financial records specially earning and profits (Bondarenko
2018).
– The management department also made so many huge changes in the balance sheets and indicated the performance in
their favor.
– As per the reports Enron only focused on the, “maximized price per share of common stock”.
– Due to this goal, the company continued to pursue unethical practices which were completely illegal.
– According to the criminal charges they also manipulated the billing data and financial statistics in order to show a great
amount of revenue as compared in reality.