Business ethics are in the forefront of today's news as corporate scandals continue to surface throughout America. Many companies have developed new ethic guidelines in the last few years in an attempt to emphasize the importance of ethics to their management teams.
Despite the emphasis on ethics, most companies issue ethics statements and policies without addressing the key issue, which is behavior. Companies fall into the false promise that have a strong ethics code their management team will somehow have the character and poise to meet the ethics code.
A recent survey conducted by the American Management Association and the Human Resource Institute identified the top three factors that would cause people to break their organizations ethical standards. These include:
- Pressure to meet unrealistic objectives or deadlines. An overwhelming 70 percent of respondents indicated a willingness to break with standards if they needed to do so to achieve a difficult objective or meet and overly aggressive deadline.
- Career advancement. In a distant second place, 39 percent said they would compromise and ethical standard if it meant advancing one's career. This could be taken to mean that the employee would break company policy for an internal advancement or that they might reveal proprietary information in order to land a job at a competitor.
- Protecting their livelihood. The third most prevalent temptation is that of self preservation. Thirty-four percent of the respondents indicated that they would compromise ethics if it would protect their livelihood.
Two simple solutions are available to organizations to reduce these three potentially dangerous ethics breaches.
The first is relatively easy: use team decision-making skills. The effective use of team decision-making skills sets realistic objectives and deadlines for an organization. This is not to say that the deadlines and objectives represent any kind of sandbagging, it is to say that the group analyzes the decision to be made and works together to achieve a plan that is both expeditious and attainable because the team believes it is possible. The results are typically astounding. One manufacturer that use the program saw a 53 percent decline in rejected parts within one month after completing a teamwork program.
A second successful method is using interactive ethics workshops. These workshops do not just discuss the need for ethics or the ramifications of not complying with ethics. The most successful workshops are those that help individuals understand exactly where it is that they would personally draw the line when he comes to breaking an ethic. Workshops of this nature are filled with self-awareness exercises that are instrumental in helping understand exactly where the person envisions the line between right and wrong.
Most people realize that it is wrong to steal a laptop computer. Unfortunately many people feel it is okay to steal a pen. But people don't realize is at what point between a pen and a laptop ethical becomes unethical in their own mind. You can do all the preaching you want about what is right and wrong but until someone really understands where they personally view ethics you will not have a lasting impact.
Why People Break Ethics Codes