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Ethics in Employer-Employee Relationship The field of business ethics is very challenging. What makes it challenging is the fact that the conception of business ethics represent different ideas to different people (Warren, Justice, & Supreme, 2005). However, business ethics has, in most cases, been thought of as an area of acquiescence and the legal or ethical relationship involving the employee and the employer is governed and determined by some factors. The most controversial issue when it comes to the relationship between the employer and the employee is the ownership of intellectual property rights of knowledge, designs and ideas brought or invented by the employee in the course of the employment (Warren, Justice, & Supreme, 2005). With the help of ethical theories to analyze this case scenario, this paper will focus more on what happens to the knowledge, skills and designs of the employee when his or her employment relationship comes to an end. The first question in this case scenario is whether the employee can take any part of his knowledge, design or code to another employer or start a business with the knowledge and skills. According to Sonderholm (2010), the law of ethics in business states that any design or knowledge acquired or obtained during employment is the property of the owner of the business and cannot be taken to another employer; the intellectual rights of such knowledge, skill or design do not belong to the employee but the employer. According to Thomas Hobbes’s Social Contract theory, a person’s ethical or moral behavior and obligation depend on the terms of a contract entered into by the parties (Waller, 2008). In this regard, this
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