The Influence of Employees’ Ethical Behavior on Enterprises’ Social Responsibility

The enterprises’ social responsibility (CSR) importantly depends upon behavior and its important factors like values, culture, ethics and norms. This article investigates how employees’ ethical behavior defines CSR. Article includes a comprehensive literature review, and empirical results of survey about employees’ perception of ethical behavior and relations between employees’ ethical attitudes and CSR. Sample consists of more than 900 employees in Slovenian enterprises, collected in last decade. Trends about employee’s perceptions of ethical, economic, environmental, and social attitudes, show increasing importance of ethical and environmental attitudes, and decreasing importance of striving for economic performance. Social attitudes remain unchanged over the entire decade. Employees’ ethical perceptions positively and significantly impact their attitudes toward social and environmental concerns. Their impact on attitudes toward giving priority to economic results is negative and significant. The considered relations were controlled by demographic variables mediating the relationship only for economic concern. Results of trends and relations confirm the significant influence of employees’ ethical behavior on CSR. The developed solution enables improvement of CSR considering importance of influences of employees’ ethical attitudes on aspects of CSR. The proposed solution reduces unexplained part of CSR related to ethical behavior and develops requisitely holistic methodological framework for future consideration of other behavior factors in enterprise.     

Ethics of a Sustainable Enterprise—and the Need for it

In the modern global economy, new criteria are needed to describe the most modern enterprises: Sustainable Enterprise (SE) and Sustainable Enterprise Ethics (SEE). Long-term existence and development of humans and organisations depend, largely, on application of the sustainable development (SD) concept. Already, some enterprises consider the modern conditions and apply the requisite synergy of economic, ecological, social and ethical aims. They can be called Sustainable Enterprises (SEs). Suitable activities of SEs depend on their ethics even more than on their knowledge—Sustainable Enterprise Ethics. Attainment of SEE demands innovation of values, culture and behaviour of all critical SEs’ participants for them to understand, achieve and use SEE as a more/requisitely holistic practice, based on ethics of interdependence (EI). We offer some new suggestions on why humans need SE and SEE and suggest ways to create and implement EI as SEE in and for SEs rather than the traditional one-sided business behaviour.

On Requisitely Holistic Understanding of Sustainable Development from Business Viewpoints

In the new millennium, and in its global economy, everybody will have to be very competitive and hence innovative. For this reason most humans, economies, and businesses must innovate our understanding of economics in all areas and levels of human activity. The new challenges require a thorough innovation of work, including a requisitely³ holistic consideration of sustainable development (SD). In our contribution we would like to shift attention from a principle-based moralizing about relations between the sustainable development and enterprises to a very practical issue: how to support a more requisitely holistic understanding of SD from business viewpoints. The most important or most frequent issues of a new understanding and implementation of SD include the following: SD requires holism, hence professional and political aspects in synergy, hence systems thinking; SD requires linking of different approaches to problem solving; businesses should no longer forget about SD; ISO, etc., standards are not holistic enough concepts to solve all SD problems; A more requisitely holistic methodology is needed for implementation of SD in business. We offer some new suggestions.