Best Practices in Managerial Ethical Decision Making

Making ethical business decisions can create dilemmas for organization's managers. The ethical choice is not always a simple choice between right and wrong. Through research and evaluation of published material and personal and professional experience, this paper presents practices that organizations can use to be prepared to make an ethical decision when dilemmas are presented. Consequential and the deontological approaches to ethical decision making are explored as well as the similarities and differences between ethics and corporate social responsibility. The benefits of ethical decision making and how an organization can realize the benefits and help protect themselves from negative market perception and potential legal action resulting from noncompliance to regulations, such as The Sarbanes-Oxley Act are identified