Managing ethical behavior is a one of the most pervasive and complex problems facing business organizations today. Employees' decisions to behave ethically or unethically are influenced by a myriad of individual and situational factors. Background, personality, decision history, managerial philosophy, and reinforcement are but a few of the factors which have been identified by researchers as determinants of employees' behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas. The literature related to ethical behavior is reviewed in this article, and a model for understanding (...) ethical behavior in business organizations is proposed. It is concluded that managing ethics in business organizations requires that managers engage in a concentrated effort which involves espousing ethics, behaving ethically, developing screening mechanisms, providing ethical training, creating ethics units and reinforcing ethical behavior. (shrink)

Enterprise strategy provides an accepted theoretical framework for integrating the moral responsibilities of organizations into their strategy formulation and implementation processes. We argue that, when extended to the ecological level of analysis, enterprise strategy provides a sound theoretical framework for ethically and strategically accounting for the ultimate stakeholder, planet Earth. Within the framework of enterprise strategy, a value system based on sustainability can provide a sound ethical basis for developing ecologically sensitive strategic management systems which allow organizations to satisfy the (...) demands of the myriad green stakeholders that represent the planet in the immediate business arena. This provides a new "flavor" of enterprise strategy in which organizations "stand for sustainability." We call this new flavor "eco-enterprise strategy.". (shrink)