Everyday, global managers are faced with moral or ethical conflicts relating to both
personal and societal beliefs and values. This arena includes both societal norms in
374 MANAGEMENT ACROSS CULTURE S
general about right and wrong, as well as religious beliefs about what people “should”
or “must” do. As is the case with management theories in general, much of the readily
accessible writings on business and managerial ethics have been developed by
Western scholars educated in Western traditions of thought, and with an eye towards
the specific circumstances of Western decision makers managing in largely Western
environments. Efforts to broaden this analysis, even if only by incorporating the
tensions faced byWesterners in contact with non-Westerners, are still in a somewhat
primitive stage of development. From aWestern perspective, things would be simpler
if a Western approach to business ethics gained total consensus among the experts,
but such is not to be the case. The work of current writers and philosophers on
business and managerial ethics either examine the foundations of alternative schools
of (Western) thought, with their differential and even opposing implications for
practice, or directly proceed to discussions of specific issues at hand, assuming without
discussion the validity of a tradition of thought favored by the authors. While
these limited approaches may be interesting, the issues and challenges surrounding
ethical behavior and conflict really need to be addressed from a global perspective, not
a regional one, if we are to make progress in understanding the role of ethics in
managerial behavior.
Writers on business ethics have generally acknowledged, at least on some level, that
they have consistently been parochial in their conscious ignorance of other cultural
traditions. Even so, this has seldom been a central issue for them because most writers
have routinely assumed the universal validity of their approaches.17 That is, most of
these writers have assumed that business ethics represent a universal phenomenon and
that the challenge is to discover (and then teach) the “correct” set of values and social
norms. Obviously, this approach is both naïve and unsatisfactory, as most global
executives already understand.