Business Ethics: Marks & Spencer and the Positive Impact on Staff

This report delves into the realm of business ethics, specifically examining its impact within Marks & Spencer. It highlights the significance of positive ethical behavior, particularly in recruitment processes, emphasizing practices such as maintaining candidate confidentiality and avoiding biases like the...Read More

Business ethics.

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
1. Explaining the impact of positive ethical behaviour and importance to all employees. ...1
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................2
REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................................3

INTRODUCTION
Business ethics refers to the study of appropriate procedure followed in the organisation.
These ethics are the moral principles which are mandatory to be adhered by the enterprise. The
company chosen for this report is Marks and Spencer. It deals in clothing and other household
appliances. This report includes the positive ethical approach in terms of recruitment (Forganni
and Reed, 2019). It also encompasses the benefit of adopting positive ethical behaviour in the
organisation.
MAIN BODY
1. Explaining the impact of positive ethical behaviour and importance to all employees.
Recruitment is the process of selecting the right person for the right job. It includes
identifying, sourcing, short-listing and interviewing the candidates for the required position.
There are various steps in the process of recruitment such as recruitment planning, strategy,
searching, screening and evaluation&control. There are majorly two types of mode for
recruitment such as internal and external recruitment. Internal recruitment is the process in which
positions are filled internally such as transfers and promotion. External recruitment includes the
filling of job from outside sources such as campus recruitment and media advertisement. While
recruiting the employees, it is crucial to adopt positive ethical behaviour which are as follows -
a.) Maintaining confidentiality of candidate information- It is mandatory to conduct the
process of recruitment by keeping the candidate's personal information confidential. It is
unethical to reveal their private information till they got consent from the candidate.
b.) Halo and Horn effect – There are various biasses while recruiting candidates. For instance,
letting one positive behaviour of the candidate, judge the complete performance of the candidate
(Hirschauer, Jantsch and Musshoff, 2018). On the other hand, horn effect takes one negative
behaviour as a standard for whole performance. These errors in rating of candidates leads to
unethical behaviour towards the candidate. The Marks and Spencer avoid these types of biasses.
c.)Misleading job advertisements- There are several advertising regarding the vacancy of jobs.
The unethical practices followed are publishing the ambiguous job description and
misrepresenting the candidate. It is mandatory to keep the job description transparent which
defines the clarity in the tasks to be performed by the candidate.
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There is a significance of positive ethical behaviour to all the employees which can be
understood as given below-
1. Improved productivity- while adopting the ethical approach in the recruitment , it later
on adds value to the honest behaviour of the employees. There is a major contribution of
the employee in improving the productivity of the organisation. In context of Marks and
Spencer, it uses ethical approach in recruiting the employees which eventually increased
the efficiency of the employees working in the organisation (Lu and Ke, 2020).
Therefore, employee will get good returns on the basis of goods produced.
2. Lessen stress – when an organisation adheres to the good ethical behaviour in recruiting
the employees. It reduces the psychological burden of the candidate and they will
perform well in the process of selection. With respect to Marks and Spencer, it scored
best rating in ethical treatment to its employees.
CONCLUSION
From the above report, it can be concluded that Business ethics helps in boosting the
satisfaction of the employees and consumers. When an organisation follow ethical practices, it
will increase the goodwill of the specific organisation. Therefore, while appointing candidates it
is crucial to use ethical norms in the organisation.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Forganni, A. and Reed, H., 2019. Circumvention of Trade Defence Measures and Business
Ethics. Journal of business ethics, 155(1), pp.29-40.
Hirschauer, N., Jantsch, A. and Musshoff, O., 2018. Developing business ethics theory and
integrating economic analysis into business ethics teaching–a conceptualization based
on externalities and diminishing marginal utility. Review of Social Economy, 76(1),
pp.43-72.
Lu, Y. and Ke, Y., 2020, September. Research on Business Ethics of Dairy Industry under the
Background of Science and Technology Update. In 2020 International Conference on
Modern Education and Information Management (ICMEIM) (pp. 370-374). IEEE.
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