Importance Of Ethical Structure

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Ethical structures
The area of “ethical structures” is intended to support organizations’ ethical concerns across organizations. There is a need for ethical structures that surround the modes in which organizations strive to inculcate corporate and business ethics. Without them there are no supports in place to create ethical processes and evaluate ethical performance. This area serves as a support that the organization and its staff should be able to relate to at the strategic, tactical and operational levels of business practices. It is a point of reference to other stakeholders in the marketplace and society.
The area of “ethical structures” consists of the following sub-areas:
1. Code of ethics- Studies have found that having an ethical …show more content…

Ethics committee- The development of ethics committes is an essential structure recommended by a number of authors (Center for Business Ethics, 1986; Wood, 2002), and as such they have been incorporated by organizations in many countries (Wood et al., 2004) and it is believed that they may support the development, management and monitoring of ethical business practices across organizations.
5. Ethics training committee- Such a committee can provide a fruitful environment in which staff can engage in discussion and have education in ethics in situations that they might face whilst in the organization’s employ (Laczniak and Murphy, 1991; Rampersad, 2003; Schwartz, 2002; Trevino and Brown, 2004)
6. The support to whistle-blowers. If organizations are to evolve into ethical entities with ethical business practices, individuals must take both individual and collective action to change the business practices that they see may be an antithesis to the ethical health of the organization. Someone must make the move to expose violations of the organization’s ethical principles. Formal guidelines to support whistle blowers should be considered, because if standards are to be set then one needs ways to ensure that either violations or breaches will be reported, reviewed and corrected (Wood, 2002)
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