Chapter 1: Enhancing Business Ethics: Prescriptions for Building Better Ethics Training

The twenty-first century has borne witness to a growing list of business scandals, which have collectively harmed millions of employees. These scandals weaken public confidence in capital markets, damage trust in professional institutions, undermine the rectitude of corporate America (Adler, 2002), and inspire concern that there is an ethics crisis in the West (Sims, 1992). Widespread media coverage and publication of numerous high-profile scandals have business managers, academicians, and the public at large wondering at the cause of corporate wrongdoing and how future transgressions can be avoided (Treviño & Brown, 2004). Global awareness of these scandals has the public demanding that private and public organizational entities and the members who represent them act in accordance with high ethical and moral standards (Sims, 1992). According to the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 46% of United States consumers trust businesses to do what is right (Edelman, 2011). In response, organizations have renewed efforts to improve their ethical image (Weber, 2007). The prevalence of unscrupulous behavior in the workplace suggests that many rather than few would benefit from interventions aimed at promoting ethical behavior and limiting unethical behavior. To this end, organizations have implemented formal codes of conduct articulating their expectations of ethical behavior among employees, created mandatory ethics training programs to promote employee awareness of and commitment to ethical behavior, and appointed integrity officers tasked with the responsibility of policing and promoting ethical behavior (Weber, 2007).