Ethics Risk and Opportunity Identification and Assessment?
• The recent recognition of the need for corporate accountability to stakeholders has developed several approaches to identify the Ethics Risk and Opportunity Assessment.
• The Figure 7.1 explains comprehensive method of this assessment and which is offered in 3 phases.
• Phase 1: This phase begins with the identification of stakeholders and their interests, followed by ranking of the interests based on urgency, legitimacy, power framework and dynamic influence analysis. Then based on this they arrive at a projected understanding of the sensitivity of the issues in the stakeholder’s interest and the accuracy of the projection is verified by running it through a panel of important stakeholder groups. So at the end of this phase important stakeholder expectations for performance will emerge.
• Phase 2: In this phase, the corporate activities are compared with the stakeholder expectations to assess the risk of not meeting or the opportunities to exceed expectation. When considering whether the expectations have been met, comparisons should be made relevant to input, output, quality and other performance variables. The comparison should be done using the universally respected six hyper norm values which are honesty, fairness, compassion, integrity, predictability and responsibility. It is believed that a corporation would respect the stakeholder interest if the corporate activities follow these values. Finally the comparison should be reassessed from the perspective of impact on the corporate reputation, which depends on trustworthiness, credibility, reliability and responsibility.
• Phase 3: This phase involves the preparation of the reports of the process. The reports by stakeholder group, by product or service, by corporate objective, by hyper norm and by reputation driver should be given consideration. This set of reports help in monitoring the ethics risk and opportunities.