Good ethics ISNT good business

MANY businesses feel that practising good business ethics is costly and unnecessary to become
a profitable operation. Small businesses and micro-enterprises are particularly susceptible to this
kind of thinking. Indeed, small and medium-size businesses (SMEs) often find a start-up
opportunity by avoiding certain standards and ignoring established business ethics.
The rationale for this type of conduct is that the firm is too small to afford the best practices of
business ethics.
Many definitions of ethical business decisions and behavior are not necessarily mutually
exclusive or contradictory, yet there is no overarching theory which provides an adequate means
to link them. For example, Staw and Szwajkowski (1975) and, later, Szwajkowski (1985) have
used illegal acts to define unethical behavior. Jansen and Von Glinow (1985) discussed ethical
behavior in terms of norms and counter norms. Gatewood and Carroll (1991) expressed ethics in
terms of compliance with government laws and regulations, compliance with organizational
standards based on prescriptive principles utilizing moral concepts, or compliance with
professional standards based on similar principles. Jones (1991) defined ethical decisions as
those which are "both legal and morally acceptable to the larger community" [emphasis added]
(p. 367). He admitted this definition was imprecise and relativistic but declared it better than
previous works which did not provide substantive definitions of ethical behavior (cf. definitions
in Dubinsky & Loken, 1989; Ferrell & Gresham, 1985; Hunt & Vittell, 1986; Trevino, 1986).
Furthermore, from a behavioral point of view, specific acts such as accepting kickbacks have
been labeled as unethical by researchers and used as variables in empirical studies without any
clear reference to why these behaviors might be considered unethical (Fritzsche & Becker, 1984;
Reidenbach & Robin, 1990; Trevino & Youngblood, 1990). Although Gatewood and Carroll
(1991) argued that all three of the perspectives in their definition of ethics (legality, moral principles,
and professional standards) should be taken into consideration even though each perspective may
compete with the others, they declined to discuss how or why such a situation has evolved or can be
resolved. These are only a few examples of definitions that the existing literature provides us, but the
confusion and lack of clarity is abundantly apparent.