Chapter 7: Ethical Decision Making in the Operations Function Of Organizations: Managerial Challenges and Opportunities

Unethical decisions adversely impact employees, coworkers, customers, owners, and other stakeholders. While research on ethics in marketing, accounting, management, and other functional areas of organizations is richly developed, research on ethical issues in the operations function of organizations is relatively underdeveloped (Valentine & Hollingworth, 2011). Ethics research in the operations context is sometimes not identified as such, but rather as business ethics. This is unfortunate because it may obscure the unique challenges that operations managers (and other operational decision makers) often face. In addition, existing research often neglects many of the issues, the decision-making situations, and the context faced by operational decision makers. This study examines some of the potential barriers to ethical decision making that are particularly salient within the context of the operations function of an organization.