business ethics essay questions

Services Paper editing services Paper proofreading Business papers Philosophy papers Write my paper Term papers for sale Term paper help Academic term papers Buy research papers College writing services Paper writing help Student papers Original term papers Research paper help Nursing papers for sale Psychology papers Economics papers Medical papers Blog

80 Outstanding Business Ethics Research Paper Topics

A business ethics research paper has to be engaging and a solution to a particular economic challenge. We have a compilation of the best business ethics topics to help you achieve this task. Read on.

Social Media Business Ethics Paper Topics

Writing a research paper for a high grade is not an easy task for every student. Check social media business ethics topics to get some inspiration.

Is monitoring employee’s online behavior by companies ethical?
Should a company fire an employee if they find their information on social media detrimental to its image?
What is the role of social media in achieving responsible business
The impact of CSR initiatives on Facebook and Twitter
How do new product introductions perform on social media?
How do enterprises manage negative responses on Facebook?
How to increase positive responses without eroding business ethics
Is the notion of ‘controversial fit’ on social media ethical?

Business Ethics Research Topics on Privacy

Installation of surveillance cameras to supervise employees
To what extent can bosses watch over the actions of their staff?
Is intercepting and reading E-mail messages in an office ethical?
What ethical problem does the merging of databases containing personal information pose?
The emergence of hackers and crackers and the threat to privacy
Software for decoding digital information
Who decides the personal or private information to gather?
Do businesses adhere to the confidentiality of information policy?

Health and Safety Business Ethics Paper Topics

How does organizational ethical climate affect personal safety ethics?
The conflict between personal safety ethics and professional safety ethics
Is the office ergonomics a pressing concern?
The role of the Occupational Safety and Health Act
Facility design consistent with health and safety regulations
Hazard identification and correction by companies
Who is responsible for shutting down dangerous activities
Provision of medical surveillance in workplaces

List of Business Ethics Topics on Environmental Damage

Are businesses using energy-efficient lighting?
Proper thermostat control of heating and cooling systems
Do companies have computer equipment operating efficiently?
Use of wind power and solar panels by industries
Reducing the business’s environmental impact and carbon footprint.
Replacing plastic packaging with biodegradable materials
Examining the effects of the business practices on other species
Dealing with activities that involve clearing land and destroying animals’ habitats

Ethical Research Paper Topics on Internal Relationships

Job satisfaction and dedication levels of employees
Impact of bullying and discrimination on workers
Productivity levels fall of employees when companies do not care about them
How to sustain a healthy atmosphere among employees
Unfair treatment due to race, religion or gender
How effective is the anti-discrimination law?
Bias among employees
Eliminating unethical behaviors within an organization

Ethics Research Paper Topics on Business Leadership

What is the mark of an ethical leader?
Objectivity and transparency as leadership traits
Leaders with strong, virtuous values those with weak values
Maintaining your temper as a leader
Dealing with anger in business as a leader
Can leadership prevail in the use of strength and violence?
How a leader’s moral stance determines his ethics
Are women better business leaders than men?

Interesting Business Ethics Topics on Social Responsibility

Making ethical decision making in big corporations.
Understanding the concept of corporate responsibility.
An inspiration for social responsibility in the workplace
Investing in corporate social responsibility
How CSR trends are evolving over time
Striking a balance between profit and social responsibility
Achieving competitive advantage and CSR
How learning can contribute to CSR

Business Ethics Paper Topic Idea in Sports

Encouraging character development through sports
How unethical behavior affects ones moral and ethical standards outside the pitch
Are sports competitions alienated from real life?
How games serve as a primary outlet of our ethics
Is faking a foul or injury ethical?
How athletes attempt to get a head start in a race
Using performance-enhancing drugs
Intimidating or taunting opponents

Advertising Ethical Issues Topics for Papers

Should children appear in adverts?
Is it right for half-naked ladies to appear in adverts?
Is exaggerating ads ethical?
Talking about the side effects of products in ads
Alcohol ads on TV
Cigarettes and tobacco
Fooling customers through practical things
Ethics of advertising a sanitary napkin

Bonus Ethics Paper Topics

The roots of business ethics in psychology.
The relationship between business success and personal integrity
The place of moral leadership in a company
How to make the right decisions every day at work
Implications of leadership malfunctions and ethical failures
How far can an ethical mishap take a company?
Who should be the moral police in a corporate organization?
What are the kinds of ethical dilemmas that people face at work every day?

If it feels challenging for you to complete a business term paper, i t’s better to buy a research paper from a professional writer. Our services are cheap and high-qualitative.

After going through the comprehensive list of topics concerning papers on business ethics, nothing can stop you now. All you need to do is to select one and get going. Nonetheless, if you still find it difficult, we have guru writing help on how to write business ethics research papers and much more! Give your assignment a professional feel by using our top-rated assistance now! The process is as easy as pie. Just c ontact us with a “ do my custom research paper now” request and get an A+. Why try to work on a paper and risk failing when an expert is only a click away!

Business Insights

Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills.

Career Development
Communication
Decision-Making
Earning Your MBA
Negotiation
News & Events
Productivity
Staff Spotlight
Student Profiles
Work-Life Balance
Alternative Investments
Business Analytics
Business Strategy
Business and Climate Change
Design Thinking and Innovation
Digital Marketing Strategy
Disruptive Strategy
Economics for Managers
Entrepreneurship Essentials
Financial Accounting
Global Business
Launching Tech Ventures
Leadership Principles
Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
Leading with Finance
Management Essentials
Negotiation Mastery
Organizational Leadership
Power and Influence for Positive Impact
Strategy Execution
Sustainable Business Strategy
Sustainable Investing
Winning with Digital Platforms

What Are Business Ethics & Why Are They Important?

Business professional pressing a graphic that reads "Business Ethics" and is surrounded by icons

27 Jul 2023

From artificial intelligence to facial recognition technology, organizations face an increasing number of ethical dilemmas. While innovation can aid business growth, it can also create opportunities for potential abuse.

“The long-term impacts of a new technology—both positive and negative—may not become apparent until years after it’s introduced,” says Harvard Business School Professor Nien-hê Hsieh in the online course Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability . “For example, the impact of social media on children and teenagers didn’t become evident until we watched it play out over time.”

If you’re a current or prospective leader concerned about navigating difficult situations, here's an overview of business ethics, why they're important, and how to ensure ethical behavior in your organization.

Access your free e-book today.

What Are Business Ethics?

Business ethics are principles that guide decision-making . As a leader, you’ll face many challenges in the workplace because of different interpretations of what's ethical. Situations often require navigating the “gray area,” where it’s unclear what’s right and wrong.

When making decisions, your experiences, opinions, and perspectives can influence what you believe to be ethical, making it vital to:

Be transparent.
Invite feedback.
Consider impacts on employees, stakeholders, and society.
Reflect on past experiences to learn what you could have done better.

“The way to think about ethics, in my view, is: What are the externalities that your business creates, both positive and negative?” says Harvard Business School Professor Vikram Gandhi in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability . “And, therefore, how do you actually increase the positive element of externalities? And how do you decrease the negative?”

Related: Why Managers Should Involve Their Team in the Decision-Making Process

Ethical Responsibilities to Society

Promoting ethical conduct can benefit both your company and society long term.

“I'm a strong believer that a long-term focus is what creates long-term value,” Gandhi says in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability . “So you should get shareholders in your company that have that same perspective.”

Prioritizing the triple bottom line is an effective way for your business to fulfill its environmental responsibilities and create long-term value. It focuses on three factors:

Profit: The financial return your company generates for shareholders
People: How your company affects customers, employees, and stakeholders
Planet: Your company’s impact on the planet and environment

Check out the video below to learn more about the triple bottom line, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Ethical and corporate social responsibility (CSR) considerations can go a long way toward creating value, especially since an increasing number of customers, employees, and investors expect organizations to prioritize CSR. According to the Conscious Consumer Spending Index , 67 percent of customers prefer buying from socially responsible companies.

To prevent costly employee turnover and satisfy customers, strive to fulfill your ethical responsibilities to society.

Ethical Responsibilities to Customers

As a leader, you must ensure you don’t mislead your customers. Doing so can backfire, negatively impacting your organization’s credibility and profits.

Actions to avoid include:

Greenwashing : Taking advantage of customers’ CSR preferences by claiming your business practices are sustainable when they aren't.
False advertising : Making unverified or untrue claims in advertisements or promotional material.
Making false promises : Lying to make a sale.

These unethical practices can result in multi-million dollar lawsuits, as well as highly dissatisfied customers.

Ethical Responsibilities to Employees

You also have ethical responsibilities to your employees—from the beginning to the end of their employment.

One area of business ethics that receives a lot of attention is employee termination. According to Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability , letting an employee go requires an individualized approach that ensures fairness.

Not only can wrongful termination cost your company upwards of $100,000 in legal expenses , it can also negatively impact other employees’ morale and how they perceive your leadership.

Ethical business practices have additional benefits, such as attracting and retaining talented employees willing to take a pay cut to work for a socially responsible company. Approximately 40 percent of millennials say they would switch jobs to work for a company that emphasizes sustainability.

Ultimately, it's critical to do your best to treat employees fairly.

“Fairness is not only an ethical response to power asymmetries in the work environment,” Hsieh says in the course. “Fairness—and having a successful organizational culture–can benefit the organization economically and legally.”

Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability | Develop a toolkit for making tough leadership decisions| Learn More

Why Are Business Ethics Important?

Failure to understand and apply business ethics can result in moral disengagement .

“Moral disengagement refers to ways in which we convince ourselves that what we’re doing is not wrong,” Hsieh says in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability . “It can upset the balance of judgment—causing us to prioritize our personal commitments over shared beliefs, rules, and principles—or it can skew our logic to make unethical behaviors appear less harmful or not wrong.”

Moral disengagement can also lead to questionable decisions, such as insider trading .

“In the U.S., insider trading is defined in common, federal, and state laws regulating the opportunity for insiders to benefit from material, non-public information, or MNPI,” Hsieh explains.

This type of unethical behavior can carry severe legal consequences and negatively impact your company's bottom line.

“If you create a certain amount of harm to a society, your customers, or employees over a period of time, that’s going to have a negative impact on your economic value,” Gandhi says in the course.

This is reflected in over half of the top 10 largest bankruptcies between 1980 and 2013 that resulted from unethical behavior. As a business leader, strive to make ethical decisions and fulfill your responsibilities to stakeholders.

How to Implement Business Ethics

To become a more ethical leader, it's crucial to have a balanced, long-term focus.

“It's very important to balance the fact that, even if you're focused on the long term, you have to perform in the short term as well and have a very clear, articulated strategy around that,” Gandhi says in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability .

Making ethical decisions requires reflective leadership.

“Reflecting on complex, gray-area decisions is a key part of what it means to be human, as well as an effective leader,” Hsieh says. “You have agency. You must choose how to act. And with that agency comes responsibility.”

Related: Why Are Ethics Important in Engineering?

Hsieh advises asking the following questions:

Are you using the “greater good” to justify unethical behavior?
Are you downplaying your actions to feel better?

“Asking these and similar questions at regular intervals can help you notice when you or others may be approaching the line between making a tough but ethical call and justifying problematic actions,” Hsieh says.

How to Become a More Effective Leader | Access Your Free E-Book | Download Now

Become a More Ethical Leader

Learning from past successes and mistakes can enable you to improve your ethical decision-making.

“As a leader, when trying to determine what to do, it can be helpful to start by simply asking in any given situation, ‘What can we do?’ and ‘What would be wrong to do?’” Hsieh says.

Many times, the answers come from experience.

Gain insights from others’ ethical decisions, too. One way to do so is by taking an online course, such as Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability , which includes case studies that immerse you in real-world business situations, as well as a reflective leadership model to inform your decision-making.

Ready to become a better leader? Enroll in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability —one of our online leadership and management courses —and download our free e-book on how to be a more effective leader.

About the Author

Business Ethics News, Curated by Chris MacDonald & Alexei Marcoux

Business Ethics Journal Review

Essay Topics: Business Ethics & CSR

How Instructors Can Use Business Ethics Highlights
How Students Can Use Business Ethics Highlights
More Essay Ideas: Business Ethics & CSR
The Concise Encyclopedia of Business Ethics

Follow us via Email!

Email Address:

1. Can one business make a difference to a global problem? (See, for example: Fast Food and Animal Rights )

2. If there’s no contract, does a promise matter? (See, for example: Unethical Recruitment Practices of College Football Teams )

3. Is raising the minimum wage a good idea? (See, for example: Stories about minimum wage ethics )

4. Is it ethically OK to violate private property in order to reduce suffering? (See, for example: Law Forbids Secret Videos of Factory Farms )

5. Is equal pay for equal work always necessary, ethically? (See, for example: stories about equal pay and ethics )

6. Are companies ethically to blame when customers misuse their products? (See, for example: Are Companies Responsible for Misuse of Products? )

7. Is it OK to sell a product when you can’t prove that it works? (See, for example: Ethics of Commerce in Alternative Medicine )

8. Are there some things that simply should not be bought or sold? (See, for example: Does Paying for a Baby Symbolize Disrespect, or Embody it? )

9. Is child labour always wrong? (See, for example: Nestlé Sued Over Child Labour and child labour in Bolivia )

10. Whistleblowers: heroes or disloyal employees? (See, for example: Whistleblowers: Alone vs the System )

11. Is Uber a good or bad thing, overall? (See, for example: stories about Uber and ethics .)

12. Is misleading advertising unethical? (See, for example: Misleading Headlines About Misleading Advertising: “Dog” Fur Pom Poms on Hats )

13. Do ethics classes make people more ethical? (See, for example: Does Teaching Ethics Improve Ethics? )

14. Is capitalism a force for good or evil? (See, for example: Don’t blame capitalism .)

15. Why is trust important in modern economies? (See, for example: the Value of Trust .)

Need more ideas? Check out “More Essay Ideas: Ethics and CSR”

Business Ethics Highlights is curated by the editors of:

Business Ethics Highlights is published by:

Business Ethics Essay Examples

Ethics at work: emphasizing their significance in the workplace.

In today’s complex dynamic global business environment of the 21st century, the deep understanding of Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR is crucial to Young Entrepreneurs, who are aiming high to be at the top in their respective businesses. This is importance of work...

Ethics and Governance: an Introduction to Moral Principles

This is ethics Introduction essay where this topic will be considered. To start with, ethics is the philosophy of being a good person, doing what is right, living well with other being and desiring only that is right in life. Solomon also discussed that ethics...

Ethics of Behavior of Pharmaceutical Companies in the Market

This report aims to answer questions of whether pharmaceutical firms are acting ethically and responsibly through analyzing the stakeholders involved and qualifying the ethical considerations raised of each issue: Deceptive Marketing, Pricing and Improper payments and gifts. As immediate users of the products by Big...

Kellogg’s Misleading Special K Advertisement

The increasing globalisation and competition have left companies across all industries with fewer choices but exploit various brand awareness strategies through marketing. Advertisement message is one of the growing methods of creating brand awareness among competitors to their consumers. Ads help introduce a business, build...

Research of Ethical Shortcomings in Enron Case

Enron Corporation – one of the largest energy-based companies in America, eventually fell into the abyss of bankruptcy in the year 2001. The dramatic rise to power by Enron to later facing a dizzying fall shook the Wallstreet and affected thousands of people. This failure...

Kellogg`s Company: Analytics of Ethical Behavior in the Market

The sector in which I’ll be discussing about in this report is the food sector. The company in which I’ll be discussing about is Kellogg’s. They were opened in 1906 by the founder Will Keith Kellogg. Kellogg’s originally entered the market as a cereal-based product...

The Benefits of Outsourcing for Businesses

Businesses often recruit services from a source outside of its internal operations and engaging in this procedure is referred to as outsourcing. Outsourcing jobs is becoming more accepted with businesses in today's global economy. Organizations are realizing the benefits that come with outsourcing jobs. Companies...

Wal-marts Corporate Ethics and Social Responsibilities Efforts

Wal-Mart is a multi-billion corporation that opened its doors back in 1962, on July 2nd of that year the first Wal-Mart store was opened in Rogers, Arkansas under the supervision and influence of Sam Walton. Walton is the man responsible for engraving the goals, values,...

Corporate Psychopaths and the Implications They Can Bring on the Organization

The chosen topic of this review and synthesis is to look at one of the members of the ‘dark triad’ – psychopaths and how they find their way into the organizations or corporations therefore becoming a “corporate psychopath’’ or an ‘’organizational psychopath’’. It is important...

The Principles of Ethical Human Resource Management

“Human Resource Management is the set of organizational activities directed at attracting, developing and maintaining an effective workforce.”- Ricky W. Griffin The overall objective of human resources is to ensure that the organisation is able to attain success by people. HR practitioners manage the human...

Trying to find an excellent essay sample but no results?

Don’t waste your time and get a professional writer to help!