All these incidents of unethical activity in business underscore the widespread need for a better understanding of the factors that contribute to ethical and unethical decisions. Individuals’ personal moral philosophies and decision making experience may not be sufficient to guide them in the business world. Better understanding of business ethics will help to identify ethical issues and recognize the approaches available to resolve them (McShane &Glion, 2015).
The key components of the ethical decision making framework include ethical issue intensity, individual factors, organizational factors, and opportunity. These factors are interrelated and influence business ethics evaluations and intentions, which result in ethical or unethical behavior. The first step in ethical decision making is to recognize that an ethical issue requires that an individual or work group choose among several actions that will ultimately be evaluated as ethical or unethical by various stakeholders. Ethical issue intensity is the perceived relevance or importance of an ethical issue to the individual or work group. It reflects the ethical sensitivity of the individual or work group that triggers the ethical decision process (Hunter, 2013). That is why, as a group …show more content…
That case resulted in a $333 million award, the largest settlement ever in a direct-action lawsuit, to help the town’s 2,000 residents. In contrast, when 1,721 villagers brought suit against Rongping, the court ordered the company to pay a total compensation of $105,000 for damage to the land. And the Chinese environmental group Friends of Nature filed the country’s first-ever public-interest lawsuit, which shut down Rongping’s plant in a village, but did not offer monetary restitution for the