Managing Unethical Behavior

Managing Unethical Behavior
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Managing Unethical behavior
According to Dessler (2011), Ethics refers to “the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group; specifically, the standards you use to decide what your conduct should be”. As such, ‘Ethics' implies to conforming to a set of generally accepted standards of behavior in regard to moral conduct. Unethical behavior describes the opposite of this thought. In a business setting, several mechanisms (as discussed hereunder) can be used to manage and counter instances of unethical behavior. These include but are not limited to the ‘role modeling' nature of management and supervisors, open and transparent communication, inclined commitment to be conventional codes of ethics and reinforcement of the same. It is understood that in today's dynamic and challenging business environment, people may easily find justifications of looking the other way as far as adherence to rules, guidelines and ethical practices is concerned or when faced with an ethical dilemma in other words.
Still, Ethical Behavior in an organization represents a major factor for attainment of success. However, ethical challenges form one of major problems that challenge the performance of business organizations in the world today. It is a fact that people are the most valuable asset for any given firm (Ferrell et al. 2008). Yet still, they represent the weakest line of defense in terms of safeguarding a company's image. In the United States for instance, ethical challenges have formed the major impediments for corporations with the aim of attaining success. As such, learning from past mistakes and keeping in line with general accepted ethical codes of conducts remains a fundamental point of consideration for all competitive organizations (Erwin, 2011).
Without doubt, management of unethical behavior within an organization's setting is not an easy task. Firms that lack clear and well-defined ethical policies have a hard time dealing with cases of fraud and moral misconduct. Per se, this paper focuses on illustrating means of managing ethical behavior in the mainstream business working environment that include dishonesty, information manipulation and concealment of corrupt activities. An example of unethical behavior in practice lies in the former Enron Company liquidated in 2001. As far as Business Ethics practices are concerned, Enron was involved in extreme unethical accounting practices. The founder of the company, Kenneth Lay together with other company executives were discovered to have disposed of the company's shares for personal gain and divested the shareholders of their monies. By making use of the ‘Mark-to-market' accounting policies, the company officials were able to flourish their offshore bank accounts using suspicious profits and fraudulent company success while other employees lost their savings and their jobs as well. They reflected profits in financial statements from contracts they had signed but were to undertake. As a result, the firm was seemingly profitable to investors and partner companies. This did not only adversely affect employees but also other stakeholders like investors, customers, shareholders and partner companies among others who lost their money in the process. This provides a clear example of record unethical practice (Madsen & Vance, 2009).
To begin with, it is significant for organization to uphold the management function of keeping workers as motivated and satisfied as possible. Poor working conditions and environments adversely influence employees' morale as well as misalignment to organizational objectives, causing them to easily compromise on ethical expectations upon them. In addition, failure to involve workers in decision making within an organization discourages them from complying with a company's code of ethics. On the other hand, creation of good working relationships between employees and the management based on trust can go a long way in curbing tendencies of unethical behavior within a firm. This would facilitate reporting of unethical behavior to the relevant people in charge (Ferrell et al. 2008).
The ‘management' of any given organization ought to engage in categorical and strategically hiring and staffing ...