MANAGING BUSINESS ETHICS EFFECTIVELY MANAGEMENT ESSAY       pt2        1200

First, building an effective corporate ethics code must be taken into consideration because according to Mitchell (2003), not many companies "have a written code of conducts and ethics" although they have already known about the significance of corporate ethics (p. 90). For instance, seventy one per cent of companies in Australia and seventy per cent of companies in Japan do not have a written code of conducts and ethics (Mitchell, 2003). However, when recognizing that "a code of ethics fulfills many purposes within an organization" and in order "to compete effectively, global companies must ensure that their ethics codes and codes of conduct are culturally coherent to all employees" (Mitchell, 2003, p. 88). How might companies do this? Mitchell (2003) showed us the following interesting point:

A corporate ethics code needs to be more than the rules of the road; it should include a statement of the company's core values… Code of conduct must provide clear direction about ethical behavior when the temptation to behave unethically is strongest… In a nutshell, the code should be:

Easy to read

Practical and relevant for each business or geographic market

Sufficient but not excessive in detail

Well written and accessible in tone (Mitchell, 2003, pp. 94-95)

According to what I am thinking, what Mitchell stated looks like a magnetic needle, a very clear way, to build an effective corporate ethics code. More significantly, it was emphasized that corporate ethics codes have to be clear so everyone, even in the smallest unit of a company, can understand and follow. This is logical because if a company sets up an ethics code that sounds very well and interesting but is ill-defined, not everyone can understand its basis and what to do. In this point I think, the set code of ethics is useless and has no meaning, and even more seriously, it can make business people confused.

Second, we can manage business ethics effectively by improving codes of ethics to change behavior. In detail, when we talk about changing behavior, we would like to mention about changing perception, which "is formally described as changing the decision maker's beliefs (subjective probability distribution) as to whether an action is ethical (Lere & Gaumnitz, 2007, p. 9). In general, the purpose of improving codes of ethics to change behavior "can be achieved by careful (1) selection of code content and (2) design of enforcement mechanisms" (Lere & Gaumnitz, 2007, p. 7). Personally, I want to focus more on designing enforcement mechanisms:

An organization choosing to have an enforcement provision in its code of ethics is providing additional incentives (disincentives) to encourage (discourage) selection of certain actions. Although enforcement mechanisms can provide both incentives and disincen