Business Ethics & Employee Turnover: CAFE Matrix

Abstract: Business ethics is in discussion for its importance universally, so is the employee turnover in business. Unethical practices are unwanted, so is the high employee turnover. Unethical practices and high employee turnover in business is ubiquitous. No consensus exists on defining ethics. Employee turnover is well defined, but there is no consensus on when employee turnover is disadvantageous for the company. The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity, a maxim states that either one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself or one should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated. A direct, inverse relationship exists between high job satisfaction, high organizational commitment and employee turnover; the higher the job satisfaction and organizational commitment, the lower the staff turnover. Indeed job satisfaction leads to organizational commitment (Mowday et al, 1979). This paper attempts to build a model CAFE (Catastrophic, Averse, Feeble & Exemplary companies) to form of a matrix having high ethical standard in the company with two sets of companies having high or low employee turnover; and with low ethical standard in the company having two sets of companies with high or low employee turnover