The financial managers are facing different challenges on a daily basis. Their duties consist of the preparation of reports, providing an oversight role in the function of accounting, managing cash of the company, and engaging in planning and investment strategies. Therefore, they are required to uphold the highest ethical standards. Ethics are the set of principles that are grounded on performing the right task by maintaining the moral values where the individual or business operates.
Article 1: The Challenges of Business Ethics – Management and the Question of Ethics
According to this article, ethics management may be considered as the component of the corporate social responsibility (Jamnik, 2011). Over the past five decades, there has been a relentless call for firms to be socially responsible. This implies that there has been an expectation that business activities should not only be profitable, and conform to the law, but it should be ethical and by maintaining good corporate citizenship as well. Therefore, this article asserts that profitability, obedience to the law, engagement to the ethical practices, and maintaining good corporate citizens should be the four main social responsibilities of any company.
The financial managers in organizations face several ethical issues. However, there are occasional decisions that they face that may not have an ethical dimension. As they face ethical aspects during decision making, the managers also confront ethical problems as they conduct their leadership responsibilities. Similarly, the managerial ethics deals with the circumstances that managers are facing in their work that are instilled with the ethical content. That is the issues, decisions, and actions that contain either right and wrong matters, fair and unfair or justice and injustice issues. Therefore, the situations are the ones that may lead to disagreement concerning the correct and ethical course of action.
In this article, selfishness is the most factor that affects the financial mangers today. That is the aim of the managers are purely selfish in that they act on their behalf. Moreover, they focus only on the profitability, and success of the company (Jamnik, 2011). The immoral management does regard the law as impediments which must be overcome to accomplish the mission. The strategy of the immoral or unethical management is to abuse the opportunities of the firm for personal gain. Unethical practices allow financial managers to cut corners everywhere at any time since it is useful to them.
Article 2: Bank Bailouts: Helping or Harming the Economy
According to this article, the main reason why governments intervene to financial institutions such as banks is two-fold (Lakhani, 2013). The first reason revolves around personal incentives of the policy makers who will always act to please and appease the stakeholders and take active steps to show that they are considering the matter at hand.
Since the rise of the financial crisis in 2008, the government bailouts of big financial institutions have been a controversial subject. Therefore, it has come under special inspection. Others believe that the intervention of the government is necessary and can help the economy. On the other hand, some managers view it as a major contributory factor to financial instability. Consequently, they claim that bailout of unsecured creditors will be more dangerous since they are considered as the contributing factors that create moral hazards. While considering moral hazards, financial managers may be considering the excessive risk to gain personal benefits knowing that they will never bear the costs of their risky decisions. Therefore, bailouts are connected to the moral hazards because the creditors of the financial institutions have the obligation to gauge the riskiness of the banks before considering any investment decisions (Lakhani, 2013).
References
Jamnik, A. (2011). The Challenges of Business Ethics. Management and the Question of Ethics, 17(1), 141-152.
Lakhani, A. (2013). Bank Bailouts. Helping or Harming the Economy.
