Creating Value in Business through Ethics ?

The public has been inundated with reports of major breakdowns in business ethics in recent years. Enron, Parmalat, ABB, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Qwest, Global Crossing, Skandia, Adelphia, Tyco, Ahold, Holzman etc. have helped the issue of ethical business behaviour achieve widespread but uneasy notoriety. Are these case merely the tip of the iceberg ? How extensive are unethical behaviours at lower and middle levels of management ? Are small business managers and entrepreneurs any better ? One can also notice that writings about business ethics have been very topical for quite some time already: Kelemen and Peltonen (2001) found about 20,500 pages and 1,154 books on business ethics in the Internet. At the same time, concerns with organisational codes of ethics have intensified from the 1990s on. By 1992 the proportion of these organisational artefacts has increased to 93 percent of U.S. firms and 83 percent of firms in North America and Europe (Adams et al., 2001).