Week 3: Ethics and its importance in organizations

Organization ethics, especially in business, is very important. A company's ethics, or more often a reflection of their ethics, is one of the most public things about a company. This generalization is better applied to smaller companies than giant incorporations. People like to shop locally or at smaller stores because there is more lucidity in how that particular company does business. For instance a small pizza store I worked for in high school had its reputation ruined by a former employee who told his church the owners sold him drugs. The ethics of the store's owners were put into question and the public responded.

The class content from this week mostly talked about things which were in the Grover paper "Lying, deceit, and subterfuge: A model of dishonesty in the workplace". One thing I particularly liked from the lecture was the way in which organizations often lie. These were:

• Omission
  
• Implication
  
• Exaggeration
  
• Loopholes
  

Of those four I think omission is probably what organizations struggle with the most. There are many situations when not telling the entire story or leaving out certain facts is easy to do. The person who is "lying" may realize they are leaving out some unsatisfactory details but at the same time may think they are unimportant to the overall picture and would only detract from what has been done correctly. It could be argued either way to leave out details such as these or to go ahead and include everything. For example, a couple that is getting married may not actually want to know everything about the other person and his/her past. Sometimes things are better left unsaid. But that brings us to the original question of if it is better to leave something unsaid or undocumented, is really ethically bad? I think this paragraph, or at least how I have it in my head right now, is a great example of an ethical dilemma.

In the case when organizations do lie, they lie for special reasons. It is not often that a company will lie just for the sake of lying or to lie maliciously. Grover analyzes the reasons for deceit in his paper. I was most struck with the idea of role conflicts leading to lying. Basically Grover says when a person is placed outside of their role or possibly asked to do two different things they cope with the situation by lying about it. Organizations can learn from this analysis and should try to keep people comfortable in their roles.

A real quick example of a true model of dishonesty in the workplace…the Enron scandal. Enron executives actively lied about their company's finances in order to raise the stock price so that they could sell at a higher price. Enron also actively destroyed records so that their accountants would now know the financial trouble the company was in. It has been documented that Enron did all sorts of financial maneuvering in its time. This maneuvering helped the executives become rich but did so at the expense of the company and regular employees of the company.

Our discussion of ethics and especially that of Bok's Principle of Veracity rekindled my interest in ethics. I find ethics extremely important and pride myself in having good ethics. However, after ours reading and discussion of ethics I realized I need to make sure I reevaluate my ethics to ensure I am doing the right thing. Organizations should do the same thing and challenge themselves to make the right decisions.