The Place of Ethics in Entrepreneurship: The Nigerian Perspective

Uwaoma Ironkwe and Ordu Promise A.
Additional contact information
Ordu Promise A.: Department of Accounting, Faculty of Management Sciences, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria

International Journal of Innovation and Economic Development, 2015, vol. 1, issue 3, 45-55

Abstract: Management and entrepreneurship practitioners now face more ethical issues every day of their working lives than ever. They face hard decision that does not have an ethical dimension or facet. This is an issue of ethical problems in the decision making process. Scholars have opined that leaders confront ethical issues as they carry out their management responsibilities (Ordu and Okoroafor, 2014). Leaders face the matters of morality; right and wrong, fairness and unfairness, and justice or lack of justice, actions or behaviours in their decision making process of planning, organizing, motivating, communicating, delegating or committing some other management roles. Furthermore, ethics, entrepreneurship and ethical perspectives in management are crucial and these features are indispensible for business survival. Managers today must be informed and this has been receiving attention from scholars and industry practitioners. The focus of this paper is to assist entrepreneurship practitioners to uphold ethical practices that are vital for business survival given the ethical problems prevalent in organisations especially in Nigerian context. Looking at the theories associated with stages of ethical consciousness of organization, various forms of business ethical code formation are highlighted as these are essential and needs to be in place if any entrepreneurial activity must survive. In addition, factors that influence unethical behaviours are explored. There are ethical challenges entrepreneurship may face given the Nigerian context. In conclusion, a way forward for overcoming the ethical challenges has been suggested: getting managers to be accountable and responsible, as well as designing an ethical management index and integrity testing etc.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; ethics; ethical consciousness; unethical behaviours; Nigeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://researchleap.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09 ... rian-Perspective.pdf (application/pdf)
http://researchleap.com/the-place-of-ethics-in-ent ... igerian-perspective/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mgs:ijoied:v:1:y:2015:i:3:p:45-55

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Innovation and Economic Development from Inovatus Services Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bojan Obrenovic ().