Introduction Ethics and integrity are vital characteristics of modern businesspeople. This is a result of a combination of rising public scrutiny around businesses and the ethics of their actions. In addition to this, business leaders need to show high levels of ethical behaviour and integrity if they are to obtain the respect and commitment of their workforces and thus discharge their duties to shareholders. In this essay I will explore these issues and the importance of future business leaders developing higher levels of ethical behaviour. This will be done with reference to my own experience and views, as well as through reading and discussing some of the most prominent viewpoints on ethics and responsibility in business. Another core focus
150). This theory holds that ethical behaviour is not only important when considering individuals to whom a duty is owed, but also when considering all individuals and the whole of society. In general, virtue ethics requires one to be a moral and virtuous individual, whilst deontology requires one to carry out moral actions and utilitarianism requires one to consider the consequences of their actions. In my opinion, this makes virtue ethics the highest form of ethics, and one which is most in line with integrity and leadership in business, as well as meeting Pearse's (2014, p. 230) arguments around the need to show virtue when managing a business. It is also most in line with the arguments around a duty to all of mankind in the Holy Quran (n.d. 49:13): "O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into races and families so that you may know each other. The most honoured of you in Allah's sight are those who best keep their
152). This includes the type of lazy plagiarism I engaged in, when I have to admit I made an unconscious decision to write the results of the research I had found, and did not try to work out how to credit the sources I had taken it from. This is still a terrible thing to have done, as the literature shows that plagiarism harms the original author of the work, by reducing their perceived levels of expertise and casting doubt over the originality of their own theories and arguments (Hoover, 2006, p. 449). Another study I wrote stated that "plagiarism strikes at the heart of academe, eroding the fundamental value of academic research" (Lewis et al, 2011, p. 489). This is reflected in a study by Hong and Bedi (2012, p. 1010) which examined papers presented to the Academy of Management and showed that "25% of our sample had some amount of plagiarism, and over 13% exhibited significant plagiarism". This thus demonstrates how plagiarism as a student can spread into plagiarism as a researcher, and thus devalue future academic research. These findings show me that my actions have damaged not only myself, my tutor and the authors of the works I used without crediting them, but also the entire academic profession and business education process. I will thus need to focus my efforts on learning how to avoid plagiarism in the future