Denise Kleinrichert, assistant professor of management and ethics at San Francisco State University’s business school, is co-organizing the school’s fourth annual Business Ethics Week, which starts today.
Do you think the ethical transgressions we’ve been hearing about are more common, or just drawing more attention? I believe that the ethical transgressions we’ve seen in the 1990s and currently are largely reflective of two things: Greater public awareness of the significant financial and market harm that has occurred by overemphasis in some organizations on short-term profit at the expense of long-term integrated economic, social and environmental impacts of business. Secondly, it’s a failure on the part of many businesses to humanize the work environment by not engaging individual employees as intrinsically valuable members of the company — like a functional family.
