TITLE:
Corporate Governance and Ethical Compliance—Deriving Values from Indian Mythology
AUTHORS:
Gourav Vallabh, Garima Dadhich
KEYWORDS:
Board of Directors, Corporate Governance Framework, Ethical Corporate Governance, Leadership Traits
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.6 No.5,
October
20,
2016
ABSTRACT: Corporation is the most important part of value chain of growth for
any nation, being developed or developing. These corporation acts through the board
of directors elected by management team and shareholders. With markets expanding
beyond domestic boundaries, globalization has found new space, first in vision and
then very swiftly in mission statements of corporates. By these expanding organizations,
not only the balance sheets of these new global corporates have become rich but
also brought citizens from every corner of world to contribute and become part either
as employees or as valuable stakeholders. This wave of globalization led to the
amalgamation of different cultures under ambit of leadership which itself varied
in terms of cultures and richness of moral values. For such originations and multinational
corporations, the whole world is one market, both for their input requirement and
output sell. The phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam from Maha Upanishad REF
_Ref464676168 \r \h [1] rightly suits the new culture of such global organizations.
While competing in global market, they do require inheriting, replicating and practicing
age old principles of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, ensuring competition in healthy
sense while maintaining ethics and integrity in entire range of decision making
process. This paper attempts to review the age old mythological principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam to inherit leadership traits required in tough competitive
market and incorporate an ethical dimension into the values, they stress upon. This
paper will also attempt to review the various models like Utilitarian model, moral
rights model and Justice model and draw a fine analogy between Indian mythological
principle and corporate governance. The paper establishes the growing consensus
that effective corporate governance, just like human behaviour, is and ought to
be firmly anchored in assimilated values rather than cosmetic compliances which
aims to reassure stakeholders about the company’s
exposure to various risks, mostly in reference to decision making process.
This was achieved by analysing and interpretation of various available research
to help understand good corporate governance from Indian culture and traditions.