Moral responsibility and ethical frameworks in global supply chain sustainability

“For a corporation to be truly sustainable in this market environment, the entire supply chain must also be sustainable, and that supply chain may spread throughout the world,” (Ha-brookshire, 2017). Reaching this idealistic goal is a lot harder than it sounds. It requires a tremendous amount of integrity and personal responsibility in each organization. Company cultures need to support ethical employees, censuring unethical ones to create a new normative environment in which all members of the supply chain work in tandem with shared values and goals. Whether this is possible at all in a global environment depends on locating a common moral or ethical framework, as Ha-brookshire (2017) points out. Yet it could also come down to simple expediency, as environmental sustainability becomes as much an economic as a moral imperative. Corporate sustainability is linked closely with corporate social responsibility, in that it proposes a set of strong ethical guidelines. Unfortunately, neoliberalism and the cult of capitalism have obscured the ethical principles of business and good governance. Sustainability needs to replace profitability as the new bottom line driving the global economy. The neoliberal model typically relies on the dream of letting consumers drive sustainability policies and practices. While consumer-driven sustainability does sometimes occur, consumer behavior is too often driven by choices related to economic expediency. This is especially true for certain market segments and price-conscious consumers, both business buyers along the supply chain and individual consumers purchasing the end products. Yet governments also cannot be trusted to promote policies that regulate business. Ha-brookshire (2017) focuses exclusively on morality and ethics in an attempt to create a new paradigm in which employees and especially leaders in each and every organization start taking responsibility rather than relying on the market-driven model or the regulatory regime model. In many cases, the moral model that Ha-brookshire (2017) presents can be easily integrated with the market-driven model of neoliberal policies. Ha-brookshire (2017) points out that consumers react unfavorably towards firms that prove to be hypocritical. It is therefore in the best interest of all firms to ensure that every member of the supply chain complies with the overarching goal of sustainability. As sustainability is a long-term objective, there is significant leeway for mistakes, but those mistakes need to be addressed promptly and the course corrected to get back on track. An organization can shift from being mostly sustainable or occasionally unsustainable to being increasingly sustainable or sustainable in select areas of operations. Similarly, Ha-brookshire (2017) notes that firms that do not conform to a new sustainability ethic risk losing their best talent. Valuable employees seek sustainable organizational cultures that nurture their goals and empower them to succeed. In fact, valued employees also gravitate towards the types of organizational structures and cultures that tend to promote corporate sustainability. Ha-brookshire (2017) shows how each organization or member of a supply chain has a responsibility to reflect on and improve its organizational culture for social responsibility as well as environmental sustainability. When all the structures are in place, employees feel empowered. When employees feel empowered, they act in accordance with their values. Thus, an empowered employee is more likely to be a whistleblower because there are no negative repercussions to taking action against hypocrisy. Whistleblowing would also be unnecessary if there were methods by which the members of the supply chain could communicate better with one another to help each other improve. With sustainability as a common goal shared first by individual team members, then by individual companies, and finally, by an entire supply chain, the best interests of everyone can be met without resorting to inefficient government regulations.