Promoting Workplace Ethics

Results show that exposure to in-group members who misbehave or to others who benefit from unethical actions, greed, egocentrism, self-justification, exposure to incremental dishonesty, loss aversion, challenging performance goals, or time pressure increase unethical behavior.

Some issues are more likely to lead to unethical choices. Employees are more likely to act unethically when they don’t see their action clearly causing harm — for example, when the victim is far away or the damage is delayed. Unethical choices also occur when an employee feels that peers will not condemn their actions.

1. Be a Role Model and Be Visible. Employees look at top managers to understand what behavior is acceptable.
2. Communicate Ethical Expectations.
3. Offer Ethics Training.
4. Visibly Reward Ethical Acts and Punish Unethical Ones.
5. Provide Protective Mechanisms.

What are examples of ethical behavior? Ethical behavior includes honesty, integrity, fairness and a variety of other positive traits. Those who have others’ interests in mind when they make decisions are displaying ethical behavior. In the workplace, there might be a standard for ethics set throughout the company.

If you are to run an ethical business, you first need to know what types of issues you can expect to face and may need to overcome.

• Discrimination.
• Harassment.
• Unethical Accounting.
• Health and Safety.
• Abuse of Leadership Authority.
• Nepotism and Favoritism.
• Privacy.
• Corporate Espionage.

There are four pillars of medical ethics which are defined as follows:

• Autonomy – respect for the patient’s right to self-determination.
• Beneficence – the duty to ‘do good’
• Non-Maleficence – the duty to ‘not do bad’
• Justice – to treat all people equally and equitably.