Religion Beliefs and Business Ethics

Introduction

The expired meat of McDonald’s, the illegal cooking oil of Maxims and the sweatshop of Foxconn are well-known examples of unethical business practises. Such dreadful events raise the public concern about whether the operation of a corporation is ethical or not. Many people blame that corporations always only focus on maximizing profit and ignore ethics and values. “Business ethics”, “corporate social responsibility” and “human rights” start to appear and be aware by the public. Nevertheless, business ethics consist of various elements such as the rights and duties between a corporation and its employees, suppliers, consumers and environment. On the other hand, business ethics would be affected by different factors like history of business and religion beliefs of individuals. Various researches, studies and articles point out that there is an inseparable relationship between the religion beliefs and business ethic. Moreover, some evidences also reveal that religion belief has a positive influence to develop better business ethics. Therefore, I would like to have an in-depth analysis on the relations between religion beliefs and business ethics.

Purpose of research

Relationships between religion beliefs and business ethics

Every entrepreneur and employee has their own thoughts, religion beliefs, emotion and standard of ethics. The influence of religion beliefs to business ethics is mostly through the entrepreneur and the employees especially those entrepreneurs who have a clear and obvious religion belief so it has a higher possibility for them to apply their ethical standards of the religion to their business operation and management. Moreover, they might promote the values and ethical standards to their employees even use it as the cornerstone of the culture and ethic of their business. However, on the other hand, employees could also have their own religion beliefs and values. Their attitudes might affect the others and also the organization. Combining their thoughts and standards into one corporation, it could influence the culture and decision of the business and also develop the business ethics directly. So, we could like to analyse whether there is close relationship between religion beliefs and business ethics and it is worth for us to have a further discussion on how they affect each others.

Definitions

Religion Beliefs

Religious behaviour is a uniquely human trait, the cornerstone of it which is religious belief. Religious beliefs relate to supernatural agents (SAs) for instance “God” and to cosmological concepts and areas for example “Heaven”and “Hell” (Kapogiannis, D., Deshpande, G., Krueger, F., Thornburg, M., & Grafman, J., 2014). “Religion” is defined in Black's Law Dictionary as a legal definition, which means that “religion” is a system of faith and worship involving belief in a supreme being and containing moral or ethical codes (Zhu, G., 2010). The system would be recognized and practiced by a particular church, sect, or denomination (Zhu, G., 2010). Apart from that, belief representations involve multiple elemental cognitive and affective processes recruited in parallel (Kapogiannis, D., Deshpande, G., Krueger, F., Thornburg, M., & Grafman, J., 2014).

Business ethics

Business ethics could represent the sum of transparency, objectivity, reliability, honesty and prudence, values that allow the public to judge a business and evaluate its credibility, namely trust in business environment (Albescu, O., 2014). It relates to all the aspects of business practises and is relevant to the behaviours of individuals and entire organizations. However, business ethics are also defined by other scholars. Cavico and Mujtaba (2009) clarify business ethics is a form of “applied ethics” and define it as “a specialized study of moral right and wrong ”concentrating on the usage of ethical principles in a business (Danon-Leva, E., Cavico, F., & Mujtaba, B., 2010). While De George (1999, p. 23) suggests that the term “business ethics” could be illustrated either as movements or as part of the discipline of ethics. Business ethics is also considered to be a part of the general field of ethics and the interaction of ethics and business (Danon-Leva, E., Cavico, F., & Mujtaba, B., 2010). Overall, business ethics is the ethical responsibility of an organization to community.

As we mentioned above, different religion beliefs of individuals could affect business ethics and the decisions of an organization. In the following paragraphs, we would use three examples of religion including Islam, Buddhism and Christianity to explore the relationship between religion beliefs and business ethics.

Islam

Islam is often said to be the fastest-growing religion over the world. An estimated 1.3 billion people, or roughly one fifth of the world's population, are nominally Muslim (Phelps, S., 2010). The origin of Islam is SLM11 and it means submission, surrender, and obedience or to give one’s self up. Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable and they need to worship God for its existence (Muhammad, H., 2012). It could also say that Islam is “To worship Allah alone and none else, to perform prayer (As-Salat), to give Zakat and to observe Saum (fast) during the month of Ramadan” (M.Taqi-ud-DinAl-Hilali, 1998). Islam has its own Koran-based law which covers all the aspects of people’s lives, from matter of state like setting national policies to guiding the living rules. Besides, there are several elements of Islamic ethics including the principle of its ethics such as the good and happiness and virtues and vices, the moral virtues like justice and emphasizing on love and friendship (Omar, M., 2010).