¶ … Personal and Business Ethics
Relationship of Personal and Business Ethics
Ethics is an umbrella term with a vast number of definitions, at a high level ethics can be described as a set of rules, moral values, or principles that one follows. Two of the major subsets of ethics are personal ethics and business ethics. Personal ethics are each person's own individual set of rules and moral values that they choose to follow in their life. For example one person's ethics may be that they choose to not steal or lie. Business ethics similarly are a set of rules or principles that an employee at a company must follow. For example an employee's work ethic might be to use their work computer for only business purposes. In the following personal and business ethics will be compared; it will be shown that sometimes these two types of ethics overlap, but are in fact different from one another.
First of all, business ethics are normally documented by the company that the employee works for, often times in an office code of ethics document. When the company has put an...
These business ethics include the set of rules employees should follow for things such as computer use at work, sexual harassment, whistleblower policies, and financial integrity. These are all items the company chooses to put into place to help make their employees have ethical decisions. This improves the company's reputation, lowers their risks, and legally protects them when an employee violates the documented ethics. Companies take business ethics seriously, and many businesses have put a code of ethics in place at their companies and even hired ethics officers to help train and enforce them (Vallario, 2007).
Secondly, personal ethics are normally not physically documented, although some people do have an actual "Personal Code of Ethics" written. Instead they are the values and morals that an individual, oftentimes unknowingly, uses each day in every day actions. An individual's personal ethics may be…
