5.2.2 Organisational policy to enable integrity and credibility
Policy with an ethical base can establish integrity and credibility by guiding how an organisation determines what information should be gathered, how information should be gathered and how the information should be used. This is illustrated in Figure 7 (Clampitt, 1991:284).
Figure 3 Clampitt's policy issues
Deciding what information to gather involves considerations about privacy, particularly information about employee privacy. Leaders should determine what information they actually need about employees and to what ends it will be applied. The amount of information available to managers about employees, customers and organisations can distort decision-making. Conversely, information that managers do not act on can lead to litigation.
Deciding how the information is to be gathered does pose ethical considerations. For example, employee performance appraisal has a longstanding ethical basis, while hidden cameras and tape recorders monitoring employees may not be considered as acceptable in past decades. Yet, in a survey by the US Privacy Commission conducted in early 2001, more than 70 per cent of all US companies with 200 or more employees were found to do one of the following:
- Monitor all staff emails;
- Use hidden cameras to monitor staff;
- Require employees to undertake regular drug tests.
As the complexities of the Knowledge Age increase, and new technologies and ways of work are introduced, the ethical boundaries of organisations have become blurred. Employees under the influence of narcotics may damage corporate business but compulsory drug testing of employees is in many countries considered unethical. Similarly, an HIV+ employee in a professional contact sport raises vexed issues about ethics towards competitors and colleagues. Then there is the concept of benchmarking in which corporations align their own practices with that of their competitors. This involves some corporations participating in something close to espionage but the information about competition is vital to their own survival.
How information is collected and used involves ethics and directly impacts the standards of performance and behaviour that the organisation wishes to achieve. Workplace leaders who trade information that rightfully belongs to the organisation are liable for prosecution. How long to keep information or whether to not report information impacting organisational standards and practices may pose ethical problems and often has to be balanced against the possibility of supervisory managers' obligations to uphold the organisation's standards and values. At the interpersonal level of a leader's role, the issues of gathering and applying information are equally problematic. All these factors have to balance and this becomes more difficult where the organisation's standards and ethical basis are inconsistent with the supervisor's or their team's. Such differences require leadership action to model acceptable behaviours and to resolve or communicate to senior management where standards of individual performance contradict the organisation's culture.
Activity 7
Research and review the following websites for companies with a strong ethical basis to both their culture and purpose. For commercial companies reflect on how their ethics and culture reinforce brand identification and their core purpose.
Corporate bodies such as:
- The Body Shop http://www.the-body-shop.com/
- Johnson and Johnson http://www.jnj.com/
Professional associations such as:
- Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science ( USA ) http://onlineethics.org/
- NSW Law Society http://www.lawsociety.com.au/page.asp?PartID=547
Action groups such as:
- Transparency International, a global coalition against corruption http://www.transparency.org
- Greenpeace International http://www.greenpeace.org/
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