Transcript Day_5_rev

Institutionalising Ethics
Successful managers have:
Traits of the head – initiative,
cooperativeness, flexibility, and coolness
under pressure.
At the expense of:
traits of the heart – honesty, friendliness,
compassion, generosity, and idealism.
Michael Maccoby
Emotional detachment has an
analogue in moral disengagement
Note the responses of NASA to Challenger,
of Union Carbide to Bhopal, of Exxon to
the Exxon Valdez disaster, of Barings Bank
to Nick Leeson’s dealings, of Alan Bond to
the Tooheys hotel leaseholders, of Jodie
Rich to One Tel, of Ray Williams to HIH, of
Gordon Gekko to the world …
Jackall quotes a manager in
Moral Mazes
“What is right in the corporation is not what is
right in a man’s home or in his church.
What is right in the corporation is what the
guy above you wants from you. That’s what
morality is in the corporation.”
Jackall’s five rules of corporate
morality (survival)
(1) Don’t go around your boss;
(2) even if your boss invites dissent, tell him or her
what he or she wants to hear;
(3) if the boss wants something dropped, drop it;
(4) anticipate the boss’s wishes – don’t force him or
her to act the boss;
(5) do not report what the boss does not want
reported, cover it up and remain silent.
Goodpaster’s notion of
teleopathy
the unbalanced pursuit of goals by an
individual or group. Teleopathy ...is a
suspension of “on-line” moral judgement as
a practical force in the life of an individual
or group. It substitutes for the call of
conscience the call of decision criteria from
other sources: winning the game, achieving
the goal, following the rules laid down by
some framework external to ethical
reflection.
Rôles
• No licence to act unethically
• Rôles add to responsibilities, they do not
exempt
• Suggest that one is impersonating another
like an actor – that the function of the rôle is
what matters and the occupant doesn’t
• Contribute to lost responsibility in
organisations
Consider the structure of rôles in
organisations
‘Rather than ask “What was going on with
those people to make them act that way?”,
we ask, “What was going on in that
organization that made people act that
way?”’
James Waters
Asking this does not relieve
individuals of responsibility
This question moves the focus to the
incentives for good behaviour, the
disincentives against bad behaviour, and the
culture of risk or safety, retribution or
support in which individuals and teams act.
A crook culture exhibits the
following features
1. There is a “kill the messenger” ethos in the organisation – justifies
distortion and concealment of information.
2. There is a low degree of confidence in the accuracy of internal reports.
3. Despite claims to doing the right thing, in the last analysis, top
management does the most expedient thing.
4. Employees do not know of or refer to written ethics policies .
5. The operative value of the organisation is: if it’s legal, it’s ethical.
6. Top management’s stated concern for ethics is for public relations.
7. Managers while basically truthful are willing to deceive in order to
accomplish organizational or personal goals.
8. Managers do not believe there is an obligation to be candid where it
could harm personal or organizational goals.
9. People who ignore ethics but produce bottom line results get promoted.
How do you discover this?
An ethics audit.
An ethics audit is a survey of the members
of an organization to test their perceptions
of the health of its ethical culture.
Building an ethical culture begins with an
audit of the prevailing culture.
What else is to be done?
Codes
Leadership &
mentoring
Ethics training
Incentives &
disincentives
Ethics officers
Hotlines
Committees
Ombudsman
Newsletters
Performance standards
Can all support a culture of ethical excellence
Attending to the psychological
contract
When people join an organization they enter into
what has been called a “psychological contract” –
this is the unspoken set of agreements between
employees and the organisations that employ
them. This makes them hard to deal with for both
parties, especially when the psychological contract
is broken.
One writer has argued that “the psychological
contract may be the central determinant in whether
a person behaves ethically” (Sims 1991, 495).
CODES
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Rule of law
Common floor
State fundamental values
Can be codes of conduct or ethics or hybrid
Must be used frequently to be effective
Should be part of induction and development
Must cover whole organisation
Can be developed at top
Leadership
Studies show that the single most important factor
in employees adhering to ethical standards is
example from the top. This is a more potent than
peer pressure, or environmental factors.
Managers ought to respond to problems identified
in an ethics audit by making public statements
about the organization’s ethical commitments, the
ethos it is working to establish and its expectations
of employees.
Incentives
Reward good behaviour and never punish it.
Punish poor behaviour and never reward it.
An aid to clarity:
Decision models
•
•
•
•
•
Do not make the decision for you
Document the decision and the process
Make plain what values are sacrificed
Aid in moral reasoning
Objectify moral reasoning and allow an
example to be set
If all else fails:
Whistleblowing
• Is public exposure of a danger to public interest
• Permitted when a serious issue is not addressed
within an organisation
• Not internal
• Involves a betrayal of kinds
• Is a costly remedy
• Motives of whistleblower not central
• Difficult to legislate protection for