Corporate Sustainability and Ethical Codes Effectiveness

Abstract

In the last years, the issues regarding both sustainable development and business global responsibility have qualified the corporate governance effectiveness. Many international institutions have intervened and the companies, at least formally, have increased their attention to the interaction between stakeholder relationship management and economic, social, and environmental responsibility. The numerous and frequent scandals underline the discrepancy between the firms’ formal statements and the substantial behaviors. Most of the companies, in the industrialized country, publish well-structured code of ethics and conduct, explicating the strategic values assigned to the global responsibility. The research considers the capability of the code of conduct to influence effectively the behaviors, in relation with the needs of transparency, sharing, coherent individual behavior, and control. In relation to the importance conferred to the sustainable development by the European Union (EU), the analysis examines listed companies with the greatest market capitalization operating in the Great Britain, Germany, and Italy, in order to verify the firms’ behavioral uniformity and the effectiveness of sustainability policies. The analysis shows that the codes of ethics seem to remain only formal declarations. Conscious and rational governance not only transfers values and principles of sustainability to the firm’s behaviors and its result system, but also goes beyond a mere diffusion and formalization of codes of ethics and conducts. To achieve that, it is necessary to develop productive behaviors focused on the risk control and on managing behaviors of all the organization’s members, in particular in reference to the stakeholder relationship management. The codes of ethics, in fact, seem to assume a poor relevance for the corporate sustainability promotion if a correct formal structure does not occur integrated with strategies and processes which assure a constant workability. It requests especially: the ethic culture diffusion and sharing of related values and principles; definition and integration of critical success dimensions in relation to economic, environmental, and ecological responsibility; and identification of relevant ethical parameters and control of their observance.