Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Business Ethics: Four Spheres of Executive Responsibility

1992; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/41167424

2162-8564

Joseph L. Badaracco,

Ethics in Business and Education

The Functions of the Executive, his landmark book on managers and organizations, Chester Barnard wrote: *^*It seems to me inevitable that the struggle to maintain cooperat ion among men should as surely destroy some men morally as battle destroys some physically."'This is a grim observation.It flies in the face of our widespread celebration of business leadership, entrepreneurial achievement, and tbe triumphal march of capitalism into Asia and now Eastern Europe.Barnard's view also seem unrealistic.Management life is surely not, after all, a series of anguishing moral dilemmas.And when ethical issues do arise, the right answer, morally and legally, is often clear.Tbe typical challenge is finding practical ways to do tbe right thing, not discerning what is rigbt.Tbe investment bankers who met in dark garages to exchange inside information for suitcases of cash were not struggling on tbe horn of moral dilemmas but were breaking the law and violating their clients' trust.Yet in other cases, the central challenge is deciding what is right.In 1988, for example, the executives of Roussel UCLAF, a French pharmaceutical company, had to decide whether to market a new drug called RU 486.Early tests had shown tbat the drug was 90 to 95% effective in causing a miscarriage during the first five weeks of a pregnancy.A scientific and medical breakthrough, RU 486 was an alternative to surgical abortions, and its creators believed it could ultimately help hundreds of tbousands of women avoid injury and death from botcbed abortions.As researchers and business managers, many Roussel UCLAF executives bad been personally committed to developing RU 486.Tbey faced tbe question, however, of whether to introduce the drug and how to do so.Protests against Roussel and debates within the company were already diverting a great deal of management time and sapping employee morale.Some of the countries that Four Spheres of Executive Responsibility faced severe population problems and wanted access to RU 486-such as China-did not have tbe medical infrastructure to use the drug safely.Antiabortion groups were threatening an international boycott of the products made by Roussel UCLAF and Hoechst, the German chemical giant that was Roussel UCLAF's largest shareholder.Indeed, the costs of the boycott seemed likely to outstrip the profits from selling RU 486.Moreover, Hoechst's corporate credo emphasized support for life, a reaction to its collaboration with the Nazi deatb camps during the 1940s.What were tbe moral responsibilities of Roussel's executives?How should they have balanced tbeir ethical obligations to tbe company's sbareholders, to their employees, to the women who might use RU 486, and to the medical, and scientific, governmental, and political groups their decisions would effect?What did they owe to tbeir own consciences?In such situations, executives face morally treacherous problems.These are not issues of right versus wrong; they involve confiicts of right versus right, of responsibility versus responsibility.In sucb cases, managers cannot avoid getting tbeir bands dirty: in meeting some responsibilities, they will fail to meet others, and so they face the anguishing struggle that Barnard described.Tbe problem of dirty hands is the lot of men and women witb power and complex responsibilities.In a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, a young idealist accuses a veteran Communist leader of having sold out to the Nazi occupation.The older man replies:How you cling to your purity, young man!How afraid you are to soil your hands!All right, stay pure!What good will it do?Why did you join us?Purity is an idea for a yogi or a monk. . . .To do nothing, to remain motionless, amis at your sides, wearing kid gloves.Well I have dirty hands.Right up to the elbows.I've plunged them in filth and blood.But what do you hope?Do you think you can govern innocently?-