Preventing unethical behavior of firms＇ managers through shame as a corporate culture

The series of big scandals in the US and other countries have been sensational news around the world. Big companies with good corporate governance mechanism also suffer from the unethical behavior done by the corporate leaders. When good corporate governance mechanism are not able to prevent corporate leaders from doing unethical behaviors, then this is a sign for a corporation to look for another mechanism that can prevent corporate leaders from doing unethical behaviors. Therefore, this paper proposes that shame value may be able to lead people to think before taking any action so that unethical behavior can be minimized. This idea is developed on the basis of assumption that in the nature of people, doing unethical behavior can make people feel ashamed. By adopting shame value as a corporate culture, a firm can instill a value to the corporate leaders and other employees as an early warning system to prevent them not doing unethical behaviors. Shame value as a corporate culture creates a role model through corporate leaders to strengthen the implementation of shame value as a corporate culture and formulate the policy that can motivate employees to hold this value. Apart from that, employing values explored from religion of conduct to strengthen and maintain shame value in the organization is also suggested. Nevertheless, the limitation of shame values is that it cannot be instilled in all organization as corporate culture since the boundary of shame is different for different cultures.

Preventing unethical behavior of firms＇ managers through shame as a corporate culture

shame corporate leader corporate culture business ethics