Business Ethics, Organizational Morality, and Technology

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering business ethics principles, behavioral and organizational ethics, international ethical frameworks, and the ethical issues surrounding technology, AI, and workplace monitoring.

Business Ethics

The moral principles that guide the behavior of individuals and organizations in the business world, going beyond mere legal compliance.

Core Principles of Business Ethics

The four foundational pillars of business ethics, identified as integrity and honesty, fairness and justice, respect, and accountability.

Law

Rules created and enforced by governments to maintain societal order, which embody notions of ethics but do not address every situation where ethical questions arise.

Ethics

The moral principles that guide human behavior by determining what is fundamentally right or wrong.

Utilitarianism in Business Ethics

An ethical principle holding that the most ethical choice is the one that maximizes overall happiness and minimizes harm for the greatest number of stakeholders.

Rights-Based Business Ethics

An ethical principle maintaining that companies and managers must respect fundamental human rights regardless of profit motives, treating stakeholders as ends rather than means to financial gain.

Justice-Based Business Ethics

An ethical principle focused on fairness and equity in corporate decision-making to ensure that benefits and burdens are distributed justly among stakeholders.

Ethical Problem (Carroll & Brown)

The growing gap over time between society's rapidly rising expectations of business ethics and the slower improvements in actual business ethics.

Organizational Ethics

The moral standards that guide an organization's behavior and the decision-making processes of its members.

Managerial Ethics

The moral standards that guide an individual manager's behavior and decision-making within the workplace.

Bad Apple Perspective

A perspective on unethical behavior that focuses on the individual's moral character, asserting that misconduct occurs because some people are inherently bad.

Bad Barrel Perspective

A perspective on unethical behavior that focuses on the organizational moral environment, asserting that situational pressures such as a toxic culture compel good people to act badly.

Behavioral Ethics

The study of why people make ethical or unethical decisions, demonstrating that good intentions are frequently derailed by unconscious psychological biases.

Bounded Ethicality

The psychological condition where an individual's capacity to make ethical choices is restricted by internal biases and external pressures, often causing them to act unethically without realizing it.

Overconfidence Bias

The cognitive tendency for individuals to be overly confident in their own ethicality, leaving them vulnerable to making unethical decisions.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency to process information in ways that protect one's self-interest and reinforce a pre-existing moral self-image, leading people to unknowingly justify unethical choices as fair.

Obedience to Authority

The behavioral tendency where an employee complies with an unethical directive from a supervisor due to an overriding focus on pleasing the boss or being a team player.

Conformity Bias

The tendency of individuals to alter their ethical behavior to match the actions of their peer group rather than exercising their own independent moral judgment.

Framing Bias

The tendency for ethical judgments to depend on how a situation is presented, such as making more ethical decisions when an issue is framed as an ethical problem rather than a business problem.

Incrementalism

The psychological phenomenon where individuals fail to recognize unethical behavior when it develops in small increments over time, allowing minor misjudgments to escalate into major ethical failures.

Role Morality

The tendency for people to apply distinct, compartmentalized moral standards depending on the specific role or context in which they are acting.

Moral Equilibrium

The psychological mechanism where people keep a mental ethical scorecard and rationalize unethical conduct when they believe they have built up a moral surplus from prior good deeds.

Behavior of Superiors

The single most influential organizational factor affecting the ethical conduct and morality of employees and organizational members.

Immoral Management

A management style characterized by actively and intentionally violating ethical principles to pursue self-serving gains or organizational objectives.

Amoral Management

A management style characterized by unintentionally ignoring ethical considerations while focusing exclusively on organizational goals due to an absence of moral awareness.

Familiarity Threat

A cognitive bias contributing to amoral management where a manager's close personal relationships with specific individuals cause them to be overly sympathetic to those individuals' interests.

Discounting

A decision-making bias contributing to amoral management where managers assign less weight to future consequences than to immediate outcomes, undervaluing decisions that lack near-term repercussions.

Code of Ethics

An organization's formalized moral compass that articulates ethical standards of conduct and communicates them to all employees.

Whistleblowing Mechanisms

Organizational reporting systems designed to allow members to disclose ethical violations and wrongdoing without fear of retaliation.

Ethical Universalism

An international business approach asserting that a multinational corporation must strictly abide by its home country's ethical standards when conducting operations in foreign nations.

Ethical Relativism

An international business approach asserting that a multinational firm should adopt and follow the ethical standards and cultural norms of the host country.

Integrative Approach (International Business Ethics)

A middle-ground framework between ethical universalism and relativism asserting that universal ethical norms take precedence over local norms and that basic human rights must dictate standards.

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)

A U.S. federal statute that makes it illegal for U.S. persons, domestic entities, or foreign entities acting in the U.S. to offer anything of value to foreign government officials to secure business advantages.

Cognitive Offloading

The unanticipated societal cost of technology where individuals outsource their cognitive tasks and brainwork to digital devices.

Digital Amnesia

The psychological phenomenon where people tend to forget information because they know it is readily accessible via online search engines.

Black Box Models

Deep learning AI architectures whose internal decision logic is hidden and opaque, raising serious ethical concerns regarding transparency and accountability.

Algorithmic Bias

The phenomenon where automated algorithmic systems generate decisions that reflect and reinforce existing societal biases and systemic prejudices.

Surveillance Pricing

A method of consumer manipulation where companies collect personal and behavioral data to set individualized prices that maximize corporate profits at the consumer's expense.

Workplace Monitoring

The corporate practice of surveilling employee actions and communication channels, such as keystroke logging, taking screenshots, tracking GPS location, and measuring idle time.

Data Minimization

An ethical best practice in employee monitoring and data management dictating that companies should collect only the minimum amount of data necessary for a valid, legitimate purpose.