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A Multi-layered Illustration of Exemplary Business Ethics Practices with Voices of the Engineers in the Health Products Industry

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Abstract

Promoting ethical practice within an organization has been a continuous challenge in the business ethics community. To enrich organizational practices for promoting business ethics across an organization, this paper aims to introduce the voices of practitioners working in organizations that offer exemplary practices. Based on semi-structured interviews with 21 engineers working in the health products industry, we identified 12 pervasive ethical values that we grouped to four categories: fiduciary, economic, engineering, and process values. As ethics has been embraced as a core element of the ethical practice of our study participants regardless of their rankings and roles in their organizations, we investigated organizational strategies for promoting ethical practice. We identified four categories of organizational strategies: symbols, memberships, practices, and systems. Each strategy affected the 12 ethical values in different ways. Lastly, we identified three characteristics of the industry contexts that appeared to influence ethical values: customer impact, economic norms, and highly regulated industry. We discuss how the findings from this paper can potentially promote new discussions and practices in the business ethics community.

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Data Availability

The de-identified project data that support the findings of this study are available through a direct request to the project PI (Andrew O. Brightman, email address: aob@purdue.edu), upon reasonable request.

Code Availability

Not applicable.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Andrew Brightman, Dr. Michael Loui, Dr. Alison Kerr, Dr. Nicholas Fila, Dr. Carla Zoltowski and Athena Lin for helpful feedback and support for this work. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1737303. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1737303.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Dayoung Kim

  2. School of Engineering Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Justin L. Hess

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  1. Dayoung Kim
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  2. Justin L. Hess
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design, material preparation, data collection and analysis, and writing. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dayoung Kim.

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The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Ethical Approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of Purdue University (Purdue IRB No. 1706019324).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Kim, D., Hess, J.L. A Multi-layered Illustration of Exemplary Business Ethics Practices with Voices of the Engineers in the Health Products Industry. J Bus Ethics 187, 169–183 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05255-2

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