Category
Entrepreneurship is an exciting and rewarding journey, but it is not without its challenges. One of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs face is ethical challenges. These challenges can arise in various forms, including issues related to transparency, fair competition, intellectual property, labor practices, environmental impact, and social responsibility.
One of the larger ethical issues impacting the business world in 2020 is discrimination. In the last few months, many corporations have come under fire for lacking a divergent workforce, which is usually down to discrimination. However, discrimination can arise in businesses of all sizes. It applies treated unequally to an employee.
Discrimination is not only unethical; in other cases, it is also illegal. There are rules to save employees from discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, disability, and others. However, the gender and race pay gaps show that discrimination is still excessive.
The second big ethical issue businesses face is harassment, which is usually related to racism or sexism. This may come in the form of verbal misuse, sexual abuse, teasing, ethnic slurs, or bullying. Harassment may come from anyone in the company, as well as from clients. In specific, it is an ethical issue for the business if a supervisor is sensible of harassment from a client and takes no action to hamper it.
Publicly-traded companies may engage in unethical accounting to proceed more profitably than they really are. In many cases, an accountant or secretary may change records to skim off the top.
Another type of ethical issue that is usually secured by law is health and safety. Companies may decide to cut corners to bring down costs or perform tasks faster. As well as harm, failing to take workers’ safety into account can lead to psychosocial risks (like job insecurity or lack of autonomy), which can affect work-related stress.
Misuse of power is often clear as harassment or discrimination. However, those in a leadership role can also use their jurisdiction to pressure employees to skip over some aspects of the suitable procedure to save time (potentially putting the employee at risk), penalize workers who are unable to meet unreasonable goals or ask for irrelevant favors.
Nepotism is when an organization hires someone for being a family member. Favoritism happens when a manager treats an employee as superior to other workers due to personal reasons.
Employees have recently found that the difference between work life and personal life has become inferior clear. This occurs due to enhancement in technology.
For one thing, employers may punish for posts on social media, especially if they complain about work conditions or the organization as a whole. Employers may even fire workers who post contentious statements that go oppose company values.
The contradiction of the above can also happen: workers can abuse company data. An employee may steal intellectual property or give a competitor information about a customer.