Is what you consider a bribe what your international partners consider a necessary investment? Do your international managers follow consistent standards of ethical behavior across national borders or do they follow the maxim: “When in Rome, do as the Romans”?
Consider the implications of “When Does National Identity Matter? --Convergence and Divergence in International Business Ethics” by Wendy Bailey and Andrew Spicer in the Academy of Management Journal (www.aom.pace.edu/amjnew/). The two academics’ dense but award-winning earlier work with Tom Dunfee about how location and culture affect what U.S. and Russian business executives working domestically and in Russia will do when faced with different ethical dilemmas is underscored by this survey of business students. Their newest findings contain a cautionary tale for multi-national corporations and all doing business in the emerging global economy. (See,“Does National Context Matter in Ethical Decision Making?: An Empirical Test of Integrative Social Contracts Theory.” http://aom.pace.edu/amjnew/unassigned/spicer.pdf)

The Ethisphere Institute (http://ethisphere.com/influential/ ) recently compiled a list of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics ranking executives' “influence” based upon their involvement in government rulemaking, company practices, corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts and many other things. The final list, released last month, is notable primarily because it includes a number of privacy protection advocates including Ethisphere’s top honoree, Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner For Competition

Speaking at a recent National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) chapter meeting, I was stunned to hear CEOs and directors alike question why they should care about data quality—after all, isn’t that just the CIO's problem?
To my even greater surprise, among the least concerned in attendance were those who, like myself, were lawyers by training. Executives, Directors and ethics or compliance officers all need to recall the computer science teaching mantra “Garbage In, Garbage Out” or GIGO coined in the early days of computing to remind students that computers, unlike humans will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical input data and produce equally nonsensical output.

This week, IBM released a study on Businesses Seeking Growth through Social Responsibility available at: www.ibm.com/gbs/csrstudy.

IBM surveyed more than 250 business leaders globally to gauge how deeply Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has penetrated the core of corporate strategies and operations to discover that two-thirds of them are focusing on CSR activities to create new revenue streams. However, IBM found fewer than one-quarter of those surveyed believe they understand their customers' and other stakeholders CSR expectations well. This should be an alarming finding in today’s economic environment when customer expectations - and clout - are an increasingly important business dynamic.

Law and Ethics

Many organizations have turned to their lawyers to ensure proper conduct by employees, only to have the U. S. Sentencing Commission redress the focus on law with a call to take into account the influence of the ethics and culture of an organization on its employees’ decision-making and conduct. It may be useful to ask, just what is the relationship between ethics and the law?

Prevent Misconduct? First, understand the causes: Why do companies spend so much time and money teaching their employees about laws, regulations and company policies? Is it because executives believe that serious misconduct is the result of ignorance of the rules? Or, is it because they want evidence with which to absolve themselves when employee misconduct occurs—it’s not their fault, they told employees the rules. Why do employees break the rules, anyway?