ABSTRACT
Establishing the proper ethical conduct for employees and managers is an important yet difficult task. Recently, both the business and general press have been filled with stories exposing ethical lapses in corporations across the world. This chapter focuses on the most important issues in global ethics and provides tools to help you establish ethical guidelines for the marketing department. Any marketing department is operating in many environments that affect its ability to establish and maintain ethical conduct. Terpstra and David (1991) describe the corporate environment as including formal administrative structures such as organization charts and the assignment of authority, responsibility and information flow as well as formal administrative systems such as methods for controlling operations, evaluation and rewards systems, and the corporate culture. Ethics means a standard of behavior, a conception of right or wrong conduct. In the selling function, many difficult ethical problems emerge.
