Imagine working for a company your whole adult working life, you build up a pension, 401k savings, maybe even invest some extra money you have scraped together in the company stock. Then imagine that due to the bad behavior of one or two leaders of that company, you lost everything, your job, your pension, and your savings. Do you think that a corporate leader behaving ethically is important?
Following are some of the top corporate scandals of our time. In 2001, because of unethical behavior, Enron shareholders lost 74 billion dollars, thousands of employees lost their jobs and their retirement accounts all because a couple of Enron CEO’s thought it would be a good idea to artificially inflate earnings. In 2002 WorldCom inflated its assets leading to 30,000 lost jobs and 180 billion dollars in losses for investors. Northouse states that “ethical egoism states that a person should act so as to create the greatest good for her or himself.”(Northouse 2016, Pg. 334) I am guessing that the CEO’s of these companies subscribed to this theory of assessing the consequences of moral conduct. Northouse goes on to say that “ethical egoism is common in some business context in which a company and its employees make decisions to achieve its goals of maximizing profits.”(Northouse 2016, Pg. 334). This can only work well if the decisions are ethical ones.
The company I have worked at, for 28 years takes ethical behavior very seriously not only ethical behavior by the rank and file, but also at the highest levels. Like many other companies, they make us sit through sessions covering our code of conduct material. I often hear complaints from my co-workers, lamenting having to sit through these sessions, my response is, “it is better to have a team of leaders who behave ethically than a team who does not”, I do not after all want to be in the same shape as the poor workers that had to deal with unethical leadership at Enron and WorldCom.
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications