Colorado State University Global Campus Corporate Culture and Ethics Discussion
I’m working on a business discussion question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.
Read Example 1 and explain your take away. Add additional information.
Example 1:
It is easy to see the link between corporate culture and ethics in some negative instances.
Good examples of this are when commission-driven, competitive cultures give rise to intentionally or unintentionally incentivizing unethical behaviors among employees such as hard-sell sales tactics or even fudging sales figures.
Ethical organizations, in contrast, may strive to incentivize ethical behaviors by giving employees time off to volunteer.
But according to Epley & Kumar (2019), it is not enough merely to proclaim an ethical vision statement, or even to have a corporate culture which advances ethical values such as sustainability.
The incentive structure must promote ethics, rather than take a neutral stance.
Epley & Kumar (2019) point to Patagonia as an organization which has taken meaningful steps to promote a culture of ethics and caring for the earth, by offering incentives to employees who help customers repair their products, not simply buy them (Worn Wear), and also keeping track of metrics to measure the companys environmental footprint.
The organizations self-set standard for doing well thus incorporates ethical measures, such as the degree to which it has promoted recycling, not just the degree to which it has promoted sales.
Patagonia targets an outdoors-focused customer demographic, and its vision and values reflect ethics which customers will be sympathetic with, thus good ethics are good business sense.
But it also takes meaningful steps to ensure that those values are reinforced, both in the culture, and also in the ways in which the organization is structured.
It does not solely rely upon the corporate culture, including hiring sympathetic employees and structuring corporate statements and advertising, to reinforce those ethics.
Both ethics and corporate structure, as well as formal employee governance and initiatives like the Worn Wear program, create a seamless sense of corporate values.
There is no confusion between the metrics of sales and the values the company strives to promote. Further incentivizing recycling and reusing via customer trade-ins and repairs onsite underlines Patagonias commitment to the environment, even while it strives to improve the types of materials in its products to reduce its brands environmental footprint.
References
Epley, N. & Kumar, A. (2019). How to design and ethical organization. HBR. Retrieved from:
