Typology of entrepreneur leaders’ commitment to business ethics

Occurrence of business scandals like Enron and Parmalat around the world in recent decades, have increased the importance of business leaders and entrepreneurs’ commitment to business ethics. Today entrepreneurs strive to make employment and producing innovative products is in high rank in Iran. There is also a crucial need for deep understanding of above mentioned phenomenon to prevent its repetition. So this qualitative research (theme analysis) tries to explore the nature of the Iranian entrepreneur leaders’ commitment to business ethics. Authors tried to account the conception of subjects from the meaning of business ethics and explore their experiences in ethical dilemmas in their business and analyze their commitment to ethical codes. Statistical population is composed of entrepreneur leaders identified by business experts. Final selection of samples has been done by purposeful sampling and field data gathered by ten semi-structured and behavioral interviews. The thematic Analysis used to analyze the data (extract relevant evidence, initial coding and finding common themes). The finding of the research shows that common understanding of entrepreneur leaders from business ethics is integrity and honesty in producing products and offering services but their commitment to business ethics emerge in three different forms that authors propose a typology to this phenomenon; minimum commitment to business ethics (lawful), medium commitment (market-based) and maximum commitment (deontic).