Ethics and Organizational Climate (Research Paper Sample)

Ethics and Organizational Climate
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Ethics and Organizational Climate
Abstract
Human resource management involves efficient and effective management of people to attain the set organizational goals. Human resource personnel may induce ethical behaviors within a company by increasing their involvement in the ethical activities within the company. Unethical decisions or behaviors being attributing to personal traits may as well be in existence within the organization. Misconduct involves behaviors that result in damaging impacts for others by disregarding policies, laws and the norms of the organization that define the wider legal aspect for the maintenance of the community and are perceived as unethical by the society. The purpose of this paper is to enunciate the reasons for the unethical behaviors in the workplace. Furthermore, it will seek to address how human resource personnel can manage unethical employees.
Introduction
With regards to employment, it is the primary duty of an employee to do his or her job with moral and contractual obligations. They are ethically obliged to be loyal to the law while at work or any other time. An ethical behavior in the work environment is termed as any behavior or action that is contrary to the set ethical standards established by the company or the organization. Unethical behaviors take different forms; it could occur between employees and how they conduct themselves or how they use the organizational resources. In human resource management, organizations organize promotion and education programs for example by providing documents such as work procedures and rules and code of ethics to act as employee guidelines. However, despite the measures been taken up, unethical behaviors is still prevalent in many organizations. Employees and managers have good motive to comply with required social values (Paul & Elder 2006). Both employees and managers behave based on their personal code of behavior which includes their concern for others, their integrity and how they can be committed. Furthermore, employees keep off from engaging in behaviors that might ruin their reputation, organization, and careers. Unfortunately, in most cases employees defer set rules and procedures through their ill behaviors. This paper seeks to enunciate the reasons for the unethical behaviors in the workplace. Furthermore, it will seek to address how human resource personnel can manage unethical employees.
Reasons why employees behave unethically in the work environment
Unethical behaviors in the workplace are attributed to some reasons. It involves actions that result in negative consequences for the others by disregarding policies, laws, organizational norms and regulations that define the wider legal aspects for the maintenance of the society and are perceived as unethical by the environment. Some of the causes of unethical behavior include
Organizational culture: it is no doubt the work environment that an employee finds him or herself in may encourage them to indulge in unethical decisions (Bennett & Robinson 2000). Taking an example that gets to a workplace that is prone to nepotism or corruption is more likely to start getting involved to that unethical practice as compared to an employee who gets in a corruption or nepotism free environment. Therefore, an organizational climate that an employee gets influences their decisions.
Needs: needs are essential since they determine the existence of an individual within his or her environment. Individuals in pursuit of fulfilling their needs may go astray from the ethical to indulging in unethical. This is primarily due to family needs, personal needs or even the organizational needs that can make people move from indulging in ethical to unethical behaviors.
Opportunity: it is termed as the act of being in an advantageous position for the advancement or progress of your mission, career or education (Kendra 2008). People are tempted to indulge in unethical behaviors or decisions when they get a favorable opportunity that can enable them advance their mission. Without an opportunity, individuals lack the drive to make unethical decisions simply because they lack the driving force.
Pressure for performance: pressure to perform can make employees act unethically. Work pressure such as pressure to go ahead, the pressure to succeed and to meet expectations and deadlines or even pressure from fellow employees or employers to indulge in unethical actions (Bennett & Robinson 2000). Pressure also affects employers, for example, human resource personnel have some degree of pressure to attain set targets such as performing set budget expenditures, meeting the set sales target or performing activities in time. In an attempt to meet and exceed the requirement job employees may choose to commit an action of misconduct that is against the moral standards of the organization.
Monetary incentives: research by different scholars such as Kendra (2008) ascertained that monetary incentives are an essential drive for unethical behaviors. People indulge in acts of corruption or nepotism due to the desire for self-fulfillment. When employees are poorly paid, they are mostly tempted to gain extra financial sources through uncouth behaviors. This unethical behaviors is common to employees who have worked in a position for a relatively longer time, and best understands the daily procedures and processes involved in the transaction and knows how best to cover them up.
Social norms: in most organization employees are always needed to report their duties or services to the organization for them to get their remuneration based on the contractual agreement (Watts 2010). Organizations have created self-reporting systems for their employees mainly for control purposes. However, employees may use some of the loopholes in the system to justify their wrong doing (Gallagher 2014). The practice may increase among the employees and even become pervasive through the entire company. For example, an employee may intentionally increase his overtime report to get more pay than the real pay or may be a sales person giving false bills for his or her allowance while doing sales. Such instances are a common trend in most common organizations and can go unnoticed by the management as employees try as much as possible to gain an extra income.
Small scale dishonesty: managers are tasked with the responsibility of taking care of the organization’s assets and property. Employees are sometimes tempted to take some organizational properties or assets especially if they have little commercial value or cheaper and take them for personal use. In return, the employee when caught may argue that the asset is of negligible value and that it does not have any impact on the organization as a whole (Paul & Elder 2006). In some situations such as the issuance of coupons, gift vouchers or novelties the employee in charge may be tempted to sell some or discriminate other while doing the issuance.
Misguided loyalty: there are some situations where employees lie and perceive that in doing so is being loyal to the bosses or the organization (Watts 2010). For example an example an employee in an automobile company may intentionally fail to report a defect that may later cause an accident and even kill people. It is no doubt the employee might have hidden the information of the defect to protect their bosses and to try to be loyal.
Further, some employees may indulge in unethical behaviors because they are not very certain about the right or rather a correct thing to do. However, some know what is expected but still engage in a wrongful act in an attempt to have a personal gain, downright greed, self-interest or greed.
Furthermore, some employees get involved in unethical behaviors due to individual reasons. Employees pretend to be loyal to the authority’s unethical behaviors to avoid punishment. Moreover, other are driven by environmental factors where the work environment itself encourages individualistic activities contrary to a work environment that focusses on doing the right things and what is best for the customers, employees or the society. Also, there are employees who do not care about or have never learned about ethical values because they have no ethical values them; these employees have no grounds for applying or understanding ethical values in the organization. They do not think of the wrong or right. Instead, they only think of what they have and how they can get away with it.
Process loopholes: loop holes in the operations within an organization can as well induce unethical work behaviors. A manager or an employee may be intimidated by a stake job holder or a friend or supplier to commit a wrongdoing when they are promised mutual financial gains from the deal. It is common for long serving or senior employees in the organization whose integrity is less questioned.
How leaders can manage these types of individuals
Unethical decision or behaviors can be a plague to the work environment. They can damage the organizational credibility resulting to the organizational losing customers and even shut down in the long run. However, smart actions by human resource personnel and the management can cohesively work with the employees to eliminate or prevent unethical decisions or behaviors. Some of the ways that can be applied by leaders or human resource managers to prevent cases of unethical decisions include:
Creating ethical practices or policies within the company that aims at controlling employees wrongdoings. The ethical practices and policies should be integrated into the employee's contract, or terms of service and tough actions be applied to employees who go against them. This is because ethical considerations in the workplace are essential to building a culture of le...