Ethical Leadership and Decision Making Thesis

Reflections

The situation encountered at the DFR Insurance Corporation has a twofold moral: ethics are crucial for the success of the business operations, and, the employees are the core of organizational triumph. Also, as it is already generally accepted, organizations need to constantly change and adapt to the conditions of the micro and macroenvironments. In this order of ideas then, they should not implement change only when a major modification occurred in the environment, but they should promote change as an ongoing process, as the central piece of the corporate culture (Davenport, Harris and Cantrell, 2004).

In terms of business ethics and ethical leadership and decision making, it becomes obvious that the managers must act in accordance with the moral norms. They must, otherwise put, combine their business skills and their people skills in an adequate behavior that promotes and fosters the well-being of all categories of stakeholders.

The change implemented by the new executives at DFR Insurance failed to retrieve the desired results. The dissatisfied employees begun to register low performances as a result of low morale and this generates the need for additional human resource strategies. Had these strategies been considered in the beginning and had more emphasis been placed on the ethics of the corporate change, the endeavour would have stood increased chances of success.

8. Summary and Conclusions

In today's highly dynamic and complex business environment, economic agents strive harder than ever to minimize costs, increase profitability, territorially expand or overcome the competition. These desires lead to the implementation of numerous strategic approaches. DFR Insurance Corp. encountered such a situation and decided to change their managerial team and develop a new corporate culture. Due to misconceptions relative to the treatment of employees in an ethical manner, the endeavour failed to retrieve the desired outcome. It then becomes obvious that despite the high technical skills, business success cannot be achieved without a focus on the morality of the decisions made relative to all categories of stakeholders.

References

Bourg, J., 2003, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 17

Davenport, T.H., Harris, J.G., Cantrell, S., 2004, Enterprise Systems and Ongoing Process Change, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 10

Kraut, R., 2007, Aristotle's Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/lastaccessed on February 17, 2009

Marino, G., 2004, an Ethics Consult with Kierkegaard, Criminal Justice Ethics, Vol. 23

Miraglia, J.F., 1994, an Evolutionary Approach to Revolutionary Change, Human Resource Planning, Vol. 17

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