Essay: Business Ethics In M&S Co.

You are required to complete a series of short tasks some in class – some as preparation for class sessions that will test your research, comprehension and communication skills. The work will be collected in classroom sessions and assessed weekly such that the “Final Due date” below is for administrative purposes. 

Ethical Standards Beyond Governmental Regulatory Frameworks

Governments of various demographical regions have regulatory standards for pinpointing ethical business standards. However, business ethics in an organisation goes beyond the scope of governmental regulatory framework and requires the interception of the managerial committee of the M&S Company to establish the norms of ethical business for an organisation. The upper management of the company have framed an ethics committee and constantly works towards generation of subtle business values that can govern the action and regulation of the business operations of the company through maintained of complimentary standards. The licensing committee of the company is also liable to supervision of the professional conduct irrespective of which demographic groups is under concern (Zhang, Zhao & Xu, 2016). In this context various organisational parameters have been set by the company in the context of encouraging ethical work groups in the organisation. Besides the report also explores various theoretical frame works in order to highlight the roles that have been taken by the senior executives and the managerial committees of the company in the context of setting standards for ethical business operations in this M&S Company. In the end business recommendations have also been provided in order to indicate the means that the management committee of the company can follow for spreading the value of their ethical business in the various demographic regions where they operate.

Business ethics in the company, is actually a broad concept that can be applied to various concepts including how the individual employees behave in the context of fulfilling the business goals of the company ort what means they pertain to, in order to achieve the strategic objectives set by the organisation for the individual work groups. However, as per Belle (2017), Corporate ethics is a narrower concept and requires a stringent implication as this is the set of values that clearly and precisely indicates what are the strategic steps that any employees or as such any other stakeholder might pertain to, in the context of providing business goals and generating value to the company. M&S have introduced the policy of covalence Ethical Quotes for the internal as well as the external stakeholders of the organisation. These are standards that would monitor the ethical values that is generated by the company in the course of their CSR activities and ensuring sustainability of the fame (Visnjic, Wiengarten & Neely, 2016). The detailed data of the business transactions conducted by the company along with the customer’s feedback and the transactions reports and transcripts in some cases are sent to the investors and the public in general through various means like online reports, business skits and so on.

Organizational Parameters for Encouraging Ethical Business Operations

The company have certain guidelines for the consumers or the clientele of the company. This helps them to understand the values that the company generates through their business transactions and also understands the level of clarity that they should maintain when they approach the company with a business deal. Websites like “TheEthicalConsumer” and so on are updated with the details of Ethical Consumerism that the company follows and expects the customers to follow also. According to the opinion of Cheng, Yang and Sheu (2014), about 80% of the retail customers and the small scale economies always prefer to enter in to business ties with such organisations that generates ethical values towards the community in general and the business sector they serve. In this context, mention might be made of the multinational Asian brands like Nestle and Monsanto that lost a major part of the international clientele because of their poor ratings in the context of fulfilling the norms of ethical business. The products delivered by the companies failed to pass certain gradation tests. It was also observed that the products delivered in some particular markets were of exquisite quality. Hence the companies were alleged of performing biasness in terms of market segmentation. The business norms of the SAARC was also violated by these companies. Ethical Consumerism is also practiced by the company by maintaining the ethics committee that comprise of former team leaders, Human Resource managers and Qualitative analysts who make a detailed analysis of the judgement errors, internal policy errors and lacking in the transparency reports that is delivered by any particular expert of the Ethics management committee. Companies like Aflac, Kao Corporation (China) and Milliken have been awarded for maintaining ethics in their business operations.

Organisational leadership has a key role to play in supporting ethical behaviour in the internal atmosphere of the organisation. The National Business survey in the company have revealed that the Ethics and Compliance endeavours that have been taken by the core management of the company is responsible for enforcing disciplinary principle within the employee base of the organisation. The managerial committee have confided in their reports that in 60% of the cases of workplace misconduct, managers have taken up the responsibility of holding single interface meetings in order to ensure that the employees do not repeat the issue again. The lower level managers of the company also conducts meetings every month with the ethics committee in order to discuss what percentage of the employees in the concerned work group has pertained to the company’s ethical policies. Besides the manager’s reports of the business transactions conducted by the work group is also considered in preparing the reports of the ethics committee as well as the web releases of the “TheEthicalConsumer”.

Practicing Ethical Consumerism

There is a policy of collecting ethics ratings in order to gain in depth knowledge about character of work of the leaders of ethics management. The management hold meetings with the employees where they are questioned on the following:

• What is their perception about the efficacy of the ethical leadership that s implemented in the company and what is the perception formed by the employees during their personal interactions with the ethics committee members?
• How well do the employees suppose that the senior managers handle the crisis situations when any ethical issue comes up and what do you suppose can be alternative ways of treatment?
• What essential policies and customisations do you see the managers using predominantly for the purpose of guiding the work groups towards ethical task management?

Various ethical considerations in the internal context of the team are reflected in the interactions. Whether the managers are able to inflict dignity as well as mutual respect among the team members or share credit for prompt and precise solutions delivered against the business goals of the company are upheld by the interferences.

The company’s management should take up the initiatives to set smart objectives for the maximal utilisation of time as well as the resources. In case if any individual employees or any particular work groups are not able to meet the objectives owing to various personal consequences like failures or incompliance this might lead to compromise of M&S’s ethics and/or standards. According to the information provided by Donaldson (2015), 70% of the Chinese companies’ employees are identified as failure to meet the unreal pressure imposed upon them on the part of the company’ management. Besides, about 75% of the employees have opined in a survey that they have been working under immense pressure under the execution of their immediate senior or upper management and in a certain percentage of the cases, they had to compromise with the standards actually set by their organisation under the pressure of the executives and the unit managers.

In this context, the case of ethical breach of Volkswagen CEO might be highlighted also. Martin Winterkorn identified himself as a business personnel who could not accept failures in the business endeavours that he undertook. However, after the undertaking of the executorship the zonal managers or the operations managers of the company came under unusual pressure form the company and they lost their nerves to the pressure and this was reason that the production team went on a strike resulting in one of the epoch making crisis of the German car maker.

The CEO had a business goal to emerge as the biggest car maker in the US market of budget cars. However the annual sales of the car maker had increased to about 10 million annually. The revenue generation per year had also reached to USD $225 million. However Volkswagen had reached an imperial battle with the superior market presence of the most competent car maker in the world that is Toyota. The company seemed to challenge the market presence of Toyota and in the end the company’s production and assembly team failed to keep up with the pressure and went in to strike (Gundry, Ofstein & Kickul, 2014). The employees reflected that the company did not provide an enhancement of the facility and demanded to increase the production by the dint of manual performance. There have been a report published by the Reuters where there have been an atmosphere of distance, fear and respect in the business community of the company. The sharing of work pressure was a policy during the tenure of the CEO. The employee further opined that in order to procure the deliverables of the company, many unethical contracts have been given to many local suppliers and various governmental regulatory frame work have been violated by the company. This created the ground for the unethical and dishonest employees because the deliverance of the business goals was the sole concern of the company.

Role of Organizational Leadership in Supporting Ethical Behavior

In the presence of liberal business atmosphere in the community, the executives of the company under focus, the business executives focus on the creation of policies and ethics representing the regulatory framework of the government. Besides, there is also an important role of the ethics control personals in deciding whether the employees should comply to the standards of ethics under every condition or be liberal to the compliance standards of the policies.

According to the views put forwards by the managers of the company, rarely have the ethics control committee ben liberal to the employees violating the ethical norms of the company. In the opinion of Lages (2016), in the absence of compliance towards the company’s ethics policies, the junior employees tend to take the ethical considerations very light and the future generation of the employees would show absolute negligence towards following the ethical Standards. This is what happened in the case of the Satyam Computers Company whereby the employees gradually started to ignore the principles of ethical business operations and in the end the management also adapted to the unethical business norms. Evidently the whole management did not succumb to the ethical business strategies, yet a section of the supply chain had resorted to unethical importation of software. Nevertheless, it was revealed that the management was aware of the discrepancy in the operations and as an impact, the company was terminally blacklisted and also had to give up the advantages of operating in the free trade area (Trevino & Nelson, 2016). The slight insurgence towards unethical business means provided by the management later revealed that various business units of the comp any had opted to unethical means of operations.

A reflection of the internal policies of the organisation would help in having a greater in depth in the ethical management implemented by the company’s management.

The company have made the ethical codes available freely and ensures that before the starting of the service tenure all the employee ensure that they agree to comply by the ethics statements of the company. The company has chosen the policy of guiding the company’s staff individually in order to acquaint them with the values as well as vision of the organisation. According to the opinion of Piperopoulos (2016), the company must show attention towards ethical awareness, and inflict that the employees adhere towards constant application of the ethical norms.

The code of practice reflects a sense of professional responsibility on the part of the management so that the company can implement the most difficult strategies and decisions without much hindrance. Codes of practice helps the organisation to make the employees aware of the issues that they would face in absence of the correct or appropriate business outcomes (Souto, 2015). There are clear indications of the norms of practice that might result in the expulsion of the employees or as such any of the stakeholders from the organisation if their activities seem to violate the codes of practice.

Importance of Setting SMART Objectives in Business Operations

The retail management sector of the company have given licenses to various franchised owners to market and involve in the sales of the M&S products. However the company’s norms are violated as there is a clear indication that the sales of the products can be conducted only from authorised outlets. Other than that the issue that the company faced is lack of business ethics among their supply chain. The production franchises of the company outsources the tenders and do not maintain standards that are obvious with the production policies of the organisation.

The company should employ ethical executives and appoint such employees who have attachment and a sense of liability towards the company. The activities like misappropriation of facts should be severely punished and the human resource experts should clearly define the employees in what ways the organisation would be affected if they do not comply by the ethical terms of the company.

The ethics managers should indulge with the employees in more interactive ways and as such keep communication with majority of the internal stakeholders. This helps in understanding the motives of the stakeholders behind any business initiative that they are taking in this context.

Conclusion

Besides considering the internal factors, the companies should also address the external factors that might influence the employees of the organisation. The ethics of business operations are actually rooted to the utilitarian concerns. Analysing the concerns of the organisation regarding the ethical considerations, it can be opined that the employees’ liability towards the organisational perspectives are primary to the maintenance of the ethical codes within the organisation.

Reference List

Belle, S.M., 2017. Knowledge Stewardship as an Ethos-Driven Approach to Business Ethics. Journal of business ethics, 142(1), pp.83-91.

Cheng, C.C., Yang, C.L. and Sheu, C., 2014. The link between eco-innovation and business performance: a Taiwanese industry context. Journal of Cleaner Production, 64, pp.81-90.

Donaldson, T., 2015. Where the facts end: Richard De George and the rise of business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 127(4), pp.783-787.

Gundry, L.K., Ofstein, L.F. and Kickul, J.R., 2014. Seeing around corners: How creativity skills in entrepreneurship education influence innovation in business. The International Journal of Management Education, 12(3), pp.529-538.

Lages, L.F., 2016. VCW—Value Creation Wheel: Innovation, technology, business, and society. Journal of Business Research, 69(11), pp.4849-4855.

Pilav-Veli?, A. and Marjanovic, O., 2016. Integrating open innovation and business process innovation: Insights from a large-scale study on a transition economy. Information & Management, 53(3), pp.398-408.

Piperopoulos, P.G., 2016. Entrepreneurship, innovation and business clusters. Routledge.

Souto, J.E., 2015. Business model innovation and business concept innovation as the context of incremental innovation and radical innovation. Tourism Management, 51, pp.142-155.

Trevino, L.K. and Nelson, K.A., 2016. Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right. John Wiley & Sons.

Visnjic, I., Wiengarten, F. and Neely, A., 2016. Only the brave: Product innovation, service business model innovation, and their impact on performance. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 33(1), pp.36-52.

Zhang, Y., Zhao, S. and Xu, X., 2016. Business model innovation: an integrated approach based on elements and functions. Information Technology and Management, 17(3), pp.303-310.