Model of influence of business ethics on competitiveness of service enterprise

Abstract

Business ethics as well as organizational culture are as old as business itself. Though many researches have been carried out, lots of books and articles have been published, the problems of business ethics are not discovered in full. There is no single definition of business ethics as well as single range of individual elements and in particular there are only few attempts to construct the model of business ethics and its influence on competitiveness of an enterprise. By now, many researches have been carried out; more than 1600 articles have been published in Journal of Business alone. Therefore business ethics becomes an important creative factor in everyday business life. Interest of enterprises in business ethics has fallen down during the recession, but it still remains as an integrated set of options, demonstrating how to create and achieve value in the long term. There are very few attempts on modeling the business ethics by separate elements as well as competitiveness of enterprises by elements. Thus in the article it is attempted to compose the model of influence of separate elements of business ethics on competitiveness indicators. Research carried out by the authors in 2008 in Lithuania (133 respondents from different service enterprises were interviewed) shows that business ethics influence the organization's competitiveness. The research discovered the main elements of organizational ethics that influence the main indexes of organizational performance (in the article these are presented in the form of a model). The research showed that the proper use of business ethics can ensure a competitive advantage of an organization. The study also showed that the majority of the interviewees faced ethical problems in work environment. Thus, each organization should create and implement its own ethics code, discuss ethical issues that are legally and ethically addressed to colleagues and also to the partners.