Best practices in ethics management: Insights from a qualitative study in Slovakia

Anna Lašáková, Anna Remišová and Alexandra Bohinská

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, 2021, vol. 30, issue 1, 54-75

Abstract: Voluminous growth of new ethics management elements in corporate practice implies the need to enrich its theoretical understanding. Most studies delineate ethics management conventionally as measures primarily applied for establishing ethical norms and employee compliance. Furthermore, many models are somewhat limited in scope and amount of presented practices and usually do not conceptualize ethics management functions beyond traditional compliance‐integrity discussion. In addition, most models are not grounded in empirical research. With the aim to contribute to ethics management theory and bridge it with practice, this study employs a constructivist approach and maps best practices in ethics management via four focus groups with management professionals. Results suggest that ethics management can be viewed as a fundamentally participative and collaborative process, as a way of building relationships with external stakeholders, balancing structured planning and flexible change, and profoundly amalgamating with human resource management processes. Furthermore, in an Inventory of best practices encompassing 70 ethics practices, this study outlines nine functional subprocesses as key aspects of ethics management’s practical implementation. As the research was conducted in Slovakia, this study provides unique information on the recent developments in ethics management in one of the post‐transitional countries in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12316

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:wly:buseth:v:30:y:2021:i:1:p:54-75

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().