Lecture: Mark Leonard
Assignment 1
Introduction
In the following assignment an explanation upon how business objectives are affected by ethical issues [P4] will be presented alongside an evaluation regarding the implications faced by businesses and stakeholders to operate ethically [P5]. Furthermore, an assessment regarding the role a company acting as a moral agent will be highlighted [P6] with an analysis regarding the development of mechanisms to achieve employee involvement and empowerment [P7].
Main
Outcome 2 – understand business objectives from an ethical perspective
[P4] Ethical consideration refers to the accumulation of beliefs and values that govern the question of what is right or wrong behaviour regarding human interaction when reaching a decision to act upon or refrain from acting upon certain issues and incidents.
Whilst conducting a business, the core objectives according to best practice, that a business must adhere to are, survival; the urge and tendency to prolong the longetivity within the market to gain both monetary and non-monetary rewards, growth; which is the need to expand and diversify into new endeavours as a result of saturated markets or organic growth, increased market-share; which is a knock-on-affect of satisfying the first two objectives, once a company has managed to overcome their competitors and external factors to survive and grow, it can work on gaining more and more customers, in turn becoming a dominant market figure through quality control and environmental targets to generate a social persona, which, when all completed leads to bigger and better profits for the company, whether that be financial or non-financial.
For example, Primark outsources the manufacturing of some of their products abroad to Bangladesh; however, their subcontractors employed children and less fortunate people and worked them to the bone in very poor working condition with no job security. On one hand you could say they