Dishonesty can have a number of consequences, for business organizations as well as for individuals, ranging from merely unfortunate to tragic. This paper examines lapses in honesty and their consequences for Enron, WorldCom and other multinational companies. This paper has six pages and four sources are listed in the bibliography.
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into a false sense of security, employees are bilked out of their retirement and the attraction toward business investment in general is tarnished beyond recognition speaks to an alarming trend
overtaking far too many of todays corporate conglomerates. One might readily argue that stakeholders share in the biggest consequences, particularly because they no longer represent a diminutive collection of upper
echelon investors; rather, the stakeholder theory introduced in the 1980s established that corporate obligation goes well beyond the standard investor. This new approach, which "defined for business exactly to
whom it must be responsible and, to a large degree, for what" (Poulton, 2002), set a precedence for those at stake to be anyone "who has a direct interest in
the firm or some stake in its activity" (Poulton, 2002), such as employees, customers, suppliers, distributors, stockholders, interest groups, legal and regulatory bodies, as well as the general populace.
According to Donaldson et al (1995), Enrons ethical responsibility rests upon the following definition of what a stakeholder truly represents to every corporation, no matter the size: * Stakeholders
are persons or groups with legitimate interest in procedural and/or substantive aspects of corporate activity. Stakeholders are identified by their interests in the corporation, whether the corporation has any
corresponding functional interest in them * The interests of all stakeholders are of intrinsic value (Donaldson et al, 1995, pp. 65-91). At stake for these various individuals was a
financial guarantee from Enron, one that the corporation apparently never intended to honor. For the employees, however, the stakes - and ultimate consequences - were even greater, inasmuch as
their entire retirement funds were wiped out when the company went bankrupt. The emotional and economic cost for these employees was staggering when they learned their years of loyal