Ethics in Business Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Ethics in Business - Research Paper Example One of the most important qualities a business leader must have to remain ethical is the ability to maintain divided and often contradictory loyalties. When thought about most basically, a business leader is often a middle person between two other groups who have mutually opposing desires: board members who would like maximization of profits, and employees who want to maximize their own value for work. If imagined in the utmost simplicity, shareholders would prefer that all work be done for free so long as the quality remains sufficient, and employees would all prefer that they get paid for nothing, and these are incompatible goals. One of the fundamental problems for a business leader is how to treat both of these groups ethically. Many business leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to stockholders to maximize their profits while also having an ethical, legal, and often business interest in keeping the workforce happy and healthy.There have been several suggested solutions to thes e problems, which would allow a business leader to think of these competing interests as part of the same goal. Amongst the most prominent of these is stakeholder theory. This theory essentially states that many of these conflicts can be dealt with theoretically by imagining everyone involved as being â€Å"stakeholders,† whose interests must be collectively guarded. Firstly, it can have a paralytic effect (Heath 2006), because it does not deal with the fact that individual stakeholders will still have competing goals.