Business ethics dictates a set of standard principles and values that should be taken into account in a company’s everyday activities. It is composed of both written and unwritten codes of moral standards that are crucial to the current and future activities of a business organization. It addresses issues within a company such as the misuse of company resources, accounting fraud, defective products, bribery, conflicts of interests, etc.
There’s a direct relationship between business ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important component of business’s ethics and it refers to the company’s ethical behavior and its contribution to the economic development, the improvement in the quality of life of its workforce, the local community and the society.
Corporate Social Responsibility addresses the economic, social, and environmental impacts that business activities have and the relation of the company with its employees, customers, environment and society. CRS has assumed an important role in the last decade: outside stakeholders are more interested in the activities of the companies, for them is important to know if the company’s activities are good or bad, if there is any scandal related to their products or services, if it cares about protecting the environment and if it makes any contribution to the local community. As an outside stakeholder, financial analysts take into account, among other things, CRS as an indicator of likely future performance.