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惠普是美国著名的跨国信息技术公司。它在1934年由比尔•休利特和戴维•帕卡德创立。公司名字就是从两位创造者的名字中来的。惠普已经发展成世界上最大的信息技术公司之一。在2009年末，它成为全球500强公司中的第32位；2010年，其营业收入为1181亿，成为美国前500强公司的前十名。惠普的主要产品包括打印机、数字图像和视频,软件,计算机,信息服务和其他一些信息技术产品。由于在信息技术领域相似的产品质量使越来越来的IT行业包括惠普更加注重商业道德，以此来保持客户忠诚度。本篇文章将分析有关惠普的商业道德。第一部分，它将批判性讨论商业道德的重要性,并分析其对组织的影响；然后，进行环境分析来探索所选择的组织是否意识到，是否评估和有效管理商业道德并分析其对利益相关者的影响。除此之外，本文还对惠普和其相关利益者所面临的挑战进行关键性评估。最后，本文还提出了相关意见和建议给管理者，让他们知道如何提高惠普当前商业道德，并运用合适的相关选择。
1. Introduction介绍
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) is a well-known multinational information technology company from America. It was created in 1934 by Bill Hewlett and David Packard. The name of the company derives from the names of the two creators. HP has developed into one of the largest information technology companies in the world. By the end of 2009, it was in top 32 of the global 500 firms; and in 2010, it was top 10 in the top 500 American firms with around operating revenue of 118.3 billion dollars (Malone, 2007). The main productions of HP cover printer, digital image and video, software, computer, information service and some other information technology productions. Due to the similar quality of production in information technology field, more and more IT companies include HP pay more attention to business ethics to keep customer loyalty. The present report is intended to analyze the business ethics of HP. In the first part, it will critically discuss the importance of business ethics and analyze their impact on the organization; then it will conduct an environmental analysis to explore whether the selected organization recognizes, values, manages business ethics effectively and analyze the impact on its stake holders; besides, it will have a critical evaluation of the challenges posed by business ethics to both HP and its stakeholders; finally, it will provide recommendations and suggestions to management as to how they should improves the HP’s current business ethics approach and apply appropriate alternatives.
2. Main Body主要内容
Due to the strong competitions in the same field, more and more companies with similar level of quality transfer their attention to business ethics. Business ethics refers to the study of business situations, operating activities and determinations where issues of right and wrong are addressed. It includes morally right and wrong.. Its principals not only include commercial firms, but also cover government organizations, pressure groups, not-for-profit businesses, charities and other not-for-commercial organizations. In generally speaking, the issues that follow business ethics is subject to law. However, the situation is not always harmonious when the values of business ethics and law in conflict.
2.1. The Importance of Business Ethics of HP关于惠普商业道德的重要性
2.1.1. The importance of Business Ethics of HP关于惠普商业道德的重要性
HP conducts serials of standards of Business Ethics to regulate its employees’ actions. HP claims that any action that makes a loss to stakeholders is the action violating the business ethics (Packard, 2007). The reasons why HP pays a lot of attention to business ethics are as follows:
Firstly, the economic and political influence of HP becomes greater and greater with the improvement of its economic status. By the end of 2009, it was in top 32 of the global 500 firms; and in 2010, it was top 10 in the top 500 American firms with around operating revenue of 118.3 billion dollars(HP.com，2011). The influence of a company increase when its economy status increases. The reason is that when the economy status increases, its exposure also increases. Through the dozens of years’ rapid development, HP becomes the commercial giant in information and technology field. Therefore, its actions and operations influence the public much more than before.
Furthermore, paying attention to business ethics is the requirement from various stakeholders of HP Company. The stakeholders of company mainly include the supplier, financier, shareholders, the local community, employees and some other interested parties. The stakeholders attach great importance to HP’s business ethic as it directly influences their benefits and interests. For example, if HP had issue on the low quality of its productions, it would directly lead stakeholder to get trap into a loss of their benefits. Employees might have a lower income as the sales of HP productions decline; supplier might be replaced if the low quality caused by raw materials; shareholders might get lower shares because of the lower sales; the local community and customers would form a bad image of HP’s production, which directly leave a negative impact on spreading of HP’s brand image.
In addition, few businessmen have got formal business ethics training in current business world. Following business ethics is not forced to do like following business law, instead, it’s a moral thing that require business people to do it voluntarily. Due to being less restricted by law, companies are always regardless of it. Hence, business ethics education and training is relatively less. However, with the economy development, more and more companies own the competitive production with the similar quality; they have to focus on their business ethics to improve the brand image to get more sales and profit. In order to improve competitive force, HP should focus on its business ethics to improve its brand image and corporation influence.
Besides, violations of business ethics keep occurring. Although HP attaches great importance to business ethics, there still exist ethical violations. For example, in 2010, the international HP Company in China was got trap into the quality issue. China Central Television reported that HP’S two styles of computers which called DV2000 and V3000 own serious quality problem (Iwatani, 2011). Chinese customer required HP Company to recall the low quality computers with problems like high-temperature graphic cards, blurred screen and the splash screen. However, HP didn’t take any action to improve the situation, even worse, it denied facts. The issue irritated the Chinese customers, who appealed the issue to relevant department and asked CCTV to protect their rational rights.
Finally, following business ethics offer HP great benefits. It not only brings obvious sales prosperous to HP, but also improves the company’s brand image. A research showed that HP’s profits increased when it had a positive attitude to deal with business ethical issue, however, if it tried to conceal its unethical action by excuse, it would directly lead to a lower profit.
2.1.2. Business Ethics’ impact on HP商业道德对惠普的影响
Due to the great importance of business ethics, it directly leads to a strong impact on the organization. The influences of business ethics on HP mainly cover the following aspects: first of all, it slower the speed of HP’S globalization step. Globalization is a process that countries, companies and organizations work together disregard of country boundaries. Globalization defined as the deterritorialisation of economic activity is particularly relevant for business ethics (Coster,2010). On the one side, business ethics influence the process of the company’s globalization, on the other side, globalization brings new challenges for stakeholders of HP. Secondly, it directly has an impact on interests and benefits on stakeholders of HP. Business ethics influence sales performance of HP through affecting its brand images. The sales performances of HP directly lead impress the benefits of stakeholders. Thirdly, Business ethics influence management and operation of HP. The reason is that business ethics has been already subordinated to one of the code of conducts of HP employees. It makes a Standards of Business Conduct in which have many regulations on ethical actions of staffs.
2.2 The Environmental Analysis of HP 对惠普的环境分析
The environmental analysis of HP mainly adopts the PESTLE analysis. PESTLE includes factors of political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental. Through analyzing the internal environment and external environment of HP, it is more easily presented to explore whether HP recognizes, values, manages business ethics effectively work. Besides, the following report will also have an analysis of the environment impact on HP’s stakeholders.
2.2.1. The PESTLE analysis of HP对惠普的Pest 分析
Firstly, in regard with political factors, it includes domestic political influence and international political influence. As the one of the largest information technology American companies, HP has to subject to the American institutions such as taxes and business laws. Furthermore, as a well-known multinational company, HP has to confirm to the global legislative issues like trade barriers, safety standard and exchange rate.#p#分页标题#e#
Secondly, HP is a well-known information technology company with top 32 turnovers in the world. Due to the enormous influence of American economy, HP has a smooth way to realize its globalization dream. In addition, the global economy globalization also helps HP to quicken its international steps. Nowadays, HP own 127 multinational branches in the world (Ross,2012 ).
Thirdly, the headquarter of HP is in America, whose advanced information technology ranks first in the world. It ensures HP Company owns the sophisticated technology. Besides, the social environment also offers competitors of HP to push it improve its operation at any time.
Fourthly, HP invests a lot of budget on Research and Development. As an information technology enterprise, mastering advanced technology is the basis stone and the most important point. Furthermore, the current society provides a wholesome technology environment for HP to develop its technologies.
Fifthly, the strict institution and regulation of HP lead to the advanced management of the company. It not only set the regulations for production quality, but also sets the institutions to regulate the code of conducts of employees.
Finally, HP makes a great contribution to environment. It has already donates a lot of money to keep environment from pollution and improves its technology to protect the environment. In 2012, HP joined the World Wildlife Fund and made a contribution to improving global climate.
2.2.2 The Environment Impacts on the Stakeholders of HP对惠普利益相关者的环境影响
The stakeholder is defined as “an individual, community or organization that affects, or is affected by, the operations of company”(Brandon,2009). Stakeholders are made of internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. The internal stakeholders points to employees, while the external stakeholders refers to customers, the local community, financiers, shareholders and suppliers. Stakeholders play a key part in decision making of the company as they are the relevant benefit parties. If HP wants to have a strategic planning or marketing strategy, it will take stakeholders’ requirement and influences into consideration. Only in this way could HP have a complete analysis of the whole marketing condition and make an effective and efficient marketing plan. The environment impacts on the stakeholders are as follows:
In the first place, the external political environment ensures the stability of HP’s operation. In current time, the world focuses on peace and development. Almost all of countries’ governments pay their attention to their economy constant development, which ensures HP has a political environment to develop. The insurance of HP operation stability provides continual and stable profits for its stakeholders.
In the second place, the rapid HP economy development gives job insurance of its employees and stable profits for the shareholders. With the development of the company, more and more employees are needed to expand the operation. Besides, with the scale of the company being larger and larger, HP is more inclined to improve the employees’ trainings’ quality. There is no doubt that constant development could provide constant profits for shareholders.
In the third place, the social environment requires HP to do more things to improve the surroundings of stakeholders. In order to have a high reputation in customers’ mind, HP actively joins in the non-profit activities.
In the fourth place, the technology environment requires HP to pay more attention to choosing its suppliers. The information technology companies should focus on the budget of research and development, because it directly decides the income of the company. Therefore, how to choose a supplier with cheap raw materials but high quality is very important to HP. Nowadays HP owns its own suppliers with long-period cooperation, which provides HP a rational price of raw materials.
In the fifth place, the natural environment needs HP to do more ethical actions to improve the environments. The ethical actions of protecting environment bring profits to stakeholders of HP. For shareholders, they will get more shares as HP could get more profits through improving its brand image; in regard with customers, they will get safer production as HP pay more attention to green production; as for local community they will be more convinced of HP through analyzing its ethical actions, and as to the financiers, they will invest more money into the company through investigating the satisfaction of its customers.
2.3. The Challenges Posed by Business Ethics to HP and Its Stakeholders惠普和其利益相关者由于商业道德所面临的挑战
After knowing the importance and impact of business ethics, making a research on t he challenges caused by business ethics plays a significant part in company operation process
The business ethics brings a great challenge to its shareholders. Shareholders is a principle who contracts management as an agent to act in their interest within the boundary of the firm(Wilcox,2011 ). The form of shareholder is the common pattern in large-scale companies whose ownership and management functions are separated. The separation directly leads to the core of modern capitalism: owners don’t have a personal relationship to the companies any longer, instead, they just buy a share in the companies and ask the employees and managers of the company to run it in their benefits. The challenges posed by business ethics to shareholders include the following aspects: executive duties and control, executive remuneration, ethical aspects of merges and acquisitions, insider trading and the role of financial professionals and market intermediaries (Wilcox, 2011).
In recent years, HP has many ethical issues that influence its shareholders’ interests. In 2010, Hart, the CEO of HP, was dismissed by HP (Tsukayama, 2011). The reason was that he was suspected in sexual harassment and had a problem in financial invoice. The board of director said that Hart was got trapped into the 20- thousand- dollar corruption. Then Hart was dismissed by giving him cash dismissal wage of 12.2 million dollars, which brought a great loss to shareholders of HP. It’s well-known that Hart had a great performance in business operation. He made a great contribution to the larger scale operation through having merges and acquisitions. When he operated the operation, the turnover of HP is increased by 50%. In 2006, Patricia Dunn, was the CEO at that time, got trap into the issue of telephone tapping and was dismissed. it exposed that Dunn hired the private detective to investigate the personal phone records of board of directors and relative journalist and exposed their privacy( Tsukayama,2011 ). The issue seriously affected the brand image of HP and shocked the stock price of HP deeply. The interests of shareholders were deeply influenced by the ethical issue of the company. The ethical issue’s occurrence directly leads to a decrease of share price.
Furthermore, the business ethics brings challenges to HP’s customers.
The basis standard to tell a company whether good or not is to tell the way to treat its customers. The successful marketing strategy of a company is to outperform its competitors in offering superior value and service to its customers. The first and the last goal of the company is to meet the requirements of its customers, because customers directly affect the company’s market share and profitability. Due to the importance of customers, organizations should attach great importance to the factors that affecting customers’ choice. And the business ethics is one of the reasons that affecting customers’ loyalty. The ethical issue of HP made a strong shock on its customer loyalty and decreased the customer quantity. In 2005, an woman from America, charge with HP. The reason was that she found the company’s inkjet printer ink cartridges hidden secret to stop using the specified date. Based on her description, the chip in the ink box could tell the printer the time to replace the ink cartridge; however, the company’s chip provided incorrect time to replace ink cartridge. it wasted a lot of ink and increased the cost( BBC,2005 )
In addition, business ethical issue makes suppliers get into difficult trap. Suppliers get profits when the corporation receives orders. If the corporation did not have any order, it will result to a great loss of suppliers. Besides the influence posed by the company, suppliers also influence the company. suppliers have rights to decide the cost of the company. A good and loyal supplier could provide the best service supply service for a company and help company to reduce the total cost. Therefore, suppliers and companies are mutual dependent on each other. In 2011, American HP declared that HP Company would expand recall lithium battery of laptop that year. And the users who returned the lithium battery could get the new battery(Cliff.&Aaron,2011). The reason of the issue was that the lithium battery of laptop had the risk of overheating and damaged. The risk results in fire and even burned users. The recall issue made a great loss of HP and its suppliers. The lithium battery suppliers had a great loss as its productions would be outdated. However, the loss was temporary. The challenges caused by business ethics for suppliers include problematic power relations and troublesome intra-firm tensions. And even worse, it might influence the loyalty of supplier.#p#分页标题#e#
In addition, business ethical issue leads competitors of HP to have a better development. Competitors’ benefits and interested could be indirectly harmed or benefited from the company. However, competitors are always disregarded of by the company as a component part of stakeholders. A company owns a serial of legal rights which are protected by domestic and international trade agreements that competitors should be subject to. As a competitor, it also has the moral claim on an organization that goes beyond the codified in law like privacy right and fair play regulations. The business ethics could lead to aggressive competition and insufficient completion. The aggressive competition points to the intelligence gathering, industrial espionage, dirty trick (negative advertising, sabotage, stealing customers) and anti-competitive behavior. The insufficient competition refers to have a collusion where selected group of competitors band together to fix prices and other trading arrangements and abuse of dominant position. In 2011, HP had an ethical issue of acquisition. Hewlett-Packard used 11.1 billion dollars to purchase Britain software house Autonomy with the purpose to catch the competitors like IBM.( Goldman,2012). However, after acquisition, it’s proved that Autonomy was not worth the price. HP overused around 5 billion dollars to purchase Autonomy due to the misconduct of accounting and false statement. The goal of issue was to catch up with competitors; however, it leaded to a bad result and made its competitors took the advantages.
3. Conclusion总结
In conclusion, the importance of business ethics results to a profound impact on Hewlett-Packard Company, it not only influences the performance and operations of the organization, but also affects the benefits and interests of stakeholders. Firstly, the economic and political influence of HP becomes greater and greater with the improvement of its economic status. Furthermore, paying attention to business ethics is the requirement from various stakeholders of HP Company. In addition, few businessmen have got formal business ethics training in current business world. Finally, following business ethics offer HP great benefits. It not only brings obvious sales prosperous to HP, but also improves the company’s brand image. The stakeholder of HP covers customers, employees, suppliers, competitors and local community. The above report has already made an analysis of the challenged posed by business ethics to both HP and its stakeholders. After knowing the importance and impact of business ethics, making a research on the challenges caused by business ethics plays a significant part in company operation process.
The business ethics brings a great challenge to its shareholders, customers, suppliers, local community and competitors.. When HP operates, it should not treat itself as an isolated island, it should corporate with its competitors as it exists under a business web. The companies and stakeholders are bound by benefits and interests. HP should take stakeholders’ interests into consideration and strict regulate its actions to follow business ethics. Only in this way will it improve its brand image and bring profits to its stakeholders.
4. Recommendations建议
The recommendations of HP include two ways: pay more attention to sustainability and focus on business ethical management.
First of all, HP should focus on the sustainability of the company. HP should pay more attention to its sustainability. Sustainability is ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come, whilst meeting the following four objectives: Social progress that recognises the needs of everyone; Effective protection of the environment; prudent use of natural resources; Maintenance of high and stable levels of economic growth or employment (Lezhnev. & Alex, 2012) From the ethical issue, HP has the issue of recall battery as it would do a harm to customer’s health safety. Besides, many of ethical impacts are profound and far-reaching such as the climate change, the erosion of local cultures and environmental pollution. In order to have a sustainable development, HP should take actions to protect surrounding environment and keep a value of sustainability.
Then HP should focus on business ethical management. Business ethics management is the direct attempt to formally or informally manage ethical issues or problems through specific policies, practices, and programs (Kawamoto, 2013). Ethical actions are voluntary actions that guided by organization’ beliefs, values and recognizes. It’s moral action. It covers codes like organization codes of ethics, industry codes of ethics, programmer codes of ethics and professional codes of ethics. The codes of ethics help to define principles or standards which the company, profession, or industry believes in or wants to uphold. Besides, it helps to set out practical guidelines for employees. HP should have a formal ethical management to keep itself from ethical issues.
5. Reference参考文献
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