Last years, the CNN news has reported an unbelievable news which has caught everyone’s attention. The well-known bank Wells Fargo was being ranked on the top pages of every search engine when the news came out.There are approximately two million illegitimate bank and credit card accounts are established secretly without acknowledging their customers. Obviously, the purpose of the Well Fargo’s employees is using this method to boost their sales in the quickest way and reach the sales targets in order to receive the bonus. In addition, after this “secret” is being exposed to the public, the company has fired 5300 employees who were involved in this scandal. This news makes public start concerning about the business ethic in nowadays. This also relates to a controversial topic, what level of corporate social responsibility should organizations reached towards the community and what exactly is business ethics.
In general, the business ethic is defined as what is right or wrong in the business scenario and people has chosen to do something right. However, it also depends on people’s background, position and values. In addition, the business ethic is related to the level of corporate social responsibilities that an organization is holding towards the stakeholder, instead of just focusing on shareholders. However, this leads to a question that has no absolute answer, what level of corporate social responsibility should organizations holding?. From an organization perspective, there are both advantage and disadvantage about corporate social responsibility. On one side, high corporate social responsibility could improve company’s image and reputation in the public, and also gain more royalty and trust from their employees and customers, but on the opposite side, it would waste time and money on the things that do not make profit as the main purpose of business and companies is making profit. Moreover, business is supposed to produce better service and goods to the public instead of caring about the community.
In addition, for the Well Fargo’s case, it definitely shows the example of an organization with poor business ethic. The action that they were done is illegal and unethical. They do not care about their customers, they just focus on their own profit and how to maximize their own personal gaining. The issue of having responsibility is the basic understanding of the ethics in an organization. Ironically, it seems almost too fundamental to mentioned; however, those kinds of unethical behaviors very common in the society. The poor social corporate responsibilities which mean unethical business behavior is often starting by over greed and the addiction from making the profit, it also became an alert to the public to start thinking about their moral value and business ethics in nowadays.
Reference:
-16. 1990: Wells Fargo. (2016). Inside the Investments of Warren Buffett. doi:10.7312/lu–16462-018
-Top Business Ethics Cases of 2016. (n.d.). Retrieved September 12, 2017, from https://www.casestudywriting.com/top-business-ethics-cases-of-2016/