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Ethical Dilemma in Business Environment

Ethical Dilemma in Business Environment Business ethics are essential to any corporation in the society today. They are highly appreciated standards that regulate business activities. These ethics aim to control the behavior of business entity and persons. Moreover, they define the good and competitive advantage of a business that withholds such standards. Beauchamp, Bowie and Arnold (101) contend that business ethics aims at promoting goodness at all levels (macro, corporate and individual level) with the benefit of majority in mind. However, there are times when a business is forced to ignore these ethics in order to operate well in their environment. This is what is referred to as ethical dilemma in business environment. The following essay shall discuss on some of the categories of ethical dilemma in business environment and some solution to these problems. The first ethical dilemma in business is taking unfair advantage. For example, a business entity may decide to take unmerited advantage of a client or customer who is clueless about their products and services in an attempt to maximize their profits through increased market (Christina and Hernes 123). It is totally unacceptable for anybody in a society to take advantage of others ignorance. However, most businesses do this in an attempt to maximize their profits. The other unethical dilemma is withholding of vital information about their products and services from the customers. International business regulations demand that firms should disclose the ingredients, benefits and side effects of their products or services to the consumers. However, these companies fail in unveiling certain facts to their clients. This is because when the consumers learn that a company’s products are harmful to them, they might refuse to purchase their products resulting to falling of the business (Christina and Hernes 98). For instance, sucrose producing company will not tell its customers that its product may cause gout, obesity or tooth decay. It withholds this information so that the ignorant customers may buy the products thus increasing the company’s profit margin. However, release of such information may cause a devastating fall in their sales. Therefore, the manager is forced to weigh between falling sales and telling the clients the truth. Moreover, a company/organization may choose to release misleading information or things that are not true in an attempt to persuade more customers to consume their products or services. This might be through deceptive advertising about the quality of their goods and services in a struggle of gaining a great market share (Beauchamp, Bowie and Arnold 57). The producer will have difficulty in choosing between telling the consumers the truth and increasing their market. For example, Bata Company may advertise to its customers that it is selling the best quality of shoes that last long across the globe. Bata then makes another step of raising the prices to test its customer preference on the aspect of high prices implies good quality. This makes the customers to feel that their products are of the best quality. Contrary to what the information was all about; the clients buy the products only to realize that they could only lasts for a month. This is also a question of ethical dilemma. The company might have done that to maximize its profits or counter their competitors who are providing similar goods and are using the same techniques (Jennings 76). The company may also do this in an attempt of marketing their products by giving them the best image in the market. However, such practices do not last for long because the customer ends up realizing the lies. Apart from that, businesses always have hard time in choosing between permitting organizational abuse and observation of the ethics. Sometimes a business organization might be located in areas that are not conducive to them and in this case, if the management may decide to strictly follow the rules the organization might not perform as required. For example, an organization that is located in areas with shortage of adult labor but is very wide and is involved in massive production which is profitable might find it difficult to ignore the cheap child labor that is available. In this case, the business has to choose between low productivity or winding up and the available child labor (Jennings 87). Therefore, the possible outcome may be organizational abuse. Additionally, employees and the other staff working in the business have a hard time in choosing between observing the ethics and taking things that do not belong to them. These individuals find it difficult to avoid using business assets for personal agendas. For example, an employee may find it difficult to avoid using office internet to send email to his/her relatives. This is because using equipment at the office or business reduces the cost of life of an employee. However, this increases the expenses at the business place.