Embedding ethics in organisations and their operations: a dynamic approach

The traditional tasks of the ethics function(s) of an organisation consist in setting constraints on individual behaviours, imposing conflict of interest rules and compliance requirements in relation to processes and defining policy constraints in the form of corporate responsibility obligations. This approach has increasingly expanded from ‘ethics as a constraint’ to ‘ethics through information sharing’, by implementing training and disclosure programmes, developing risk assessment at process levels and agreeing to more policy scrutiny through transparency and benchmarking. This paper suggests that the traditional ethics functions should further expand and provide their organisations with an ethics strategy. Such functions should integrate organisational incentives with ethical considerations and embed these into individual attitudes and behaviours, processes, policies and strategies. These three stages (traditional function/information sharing/ ethics strategy) are summarised as a matrix that allows ethics practitioners to chart the desirable evolution of their organisation, seeking to increase both the sustainability and the resilience of organisations.