Business Ethics Corporate Governance  Fiduciaries:  Persons placed in positions of trust who use due care and loyalty in acting on behalf of the best interest of the organization  Duty of Diligence: A duty of care to make informed and prudent decions  Duty of loyalty;  All decisions should be in the interests of the corporation and its stakeholders  Conflict of Interest:  When a person in a powerful authority uses the position to obtain personal gain usually at the expense of the organization  BoD and Officers’ compensation !  To remove the opportunity for employees to make unethical decions; developed formal systems of accountability, oversight, and control are knwn as corporate governance  Accountability: How closely workplace decisions are aligned with a firm’s stated strategic direction  Alco compliance with ethical and legal considerations   Oversight:  A system of checks and balances that limits employees’ and managers’ opportunities to deviate from policies and strategies and that prevent unethical and illegal activities  Control:  Process of auditing and improving organizational decisions and actions  Collusion; A secret agreement between two parties for a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose  Deceitful purpose; “any sort of trickery, misinterpretation, or a strategy to lead others to believe one truth but not the entire truth” Honesty  “Tell the truth to the best of your knowledge without hiding anything”  Confucius  Li  Yi  Ren  Absence of honesty = ? Fairness  Being just, equitable and impartial  Equity  Reciprocity  Optimization Integrity    Being whole, sound and in an unimpaired condition Uncompromising adherence to ethical values Unwillingness to deviate from standards of behaviour