Can You Be 80% Ethical?
Can You Be 80% Ethical?
A report released last week shows trends that reflect today's values. The report was based on a study conducted across twelve Indian cities and the respondents were executives at the entry and middle levels.
- Nearly half of respondents said it was quite appropriate to use the office telephone to make personal calls - even long-distance calls.
- About 55% said it was OK to fudge expense accounts.
- Almost half had no qualms about recording their entry times as being within permissible limits, even when they arrived late. Similarly, they did not hesitate to mark the exit time as required even when they left early. (This finding was restricted to manual systems).
- 60% admitted to lying while applying for leave, a figure that reached 75% in some cities.
- Another 60% found nothing wrong in carrying office stationery to their homes, while 63% said it was okay to do personal work during office hours.
- 62% considered offering someone a bribe "normal and ethical" behavior.
These findings, from several major cities and across different industry sectors, inevitably lead to the question, "Are we witnessing the downside of ethics in the workplace?" More worrisome is the rationale of the respondents - when top management can charge millions on the expense account, what's wrong with our doing it at the level of hundreds or thousands? Thus, the effect of leadership on organizational culture is also brought into sharp focus.
In a country that is already pretty low on the honesty index (and high on the corruption index), such practices should set alarm bells ringing.
Ethics itself is a grey area, there being no absolute right or absolute wrong. Where do you draw the line between what is acceptable and what is not? At the same time, isn't honesty or integrity a binary phenomenon? Either one is honest or one is not. Can there be something like 80% honesty?
Mark McCormack, in his book On Managing, recounts how he was able to save thousands of dollars by the simple expedient of installing coin boxes beside company telephones and asking employees to drop a coin whenever they made a personal call. Of course, this was long before the mobile revolution. Would this work today?
At the other extreme of the proverbial pendulum is the case of a former CEO of RJR Nabisco who ordered so many aircraft for himself and for his aides that a separate hangar had to be built to house them. Whose money was it anyway? And what happens to the Agency Theory Concept?
End of the day, it boils down to values. What do you believe in and to what extent are you willing to undergo pain / suffering / unpleasantness / an uneasy conscience to achieve your ends? Aren't the means as important as the ends? Don't we want to learn anything from the collapse of once large and perceived-to-be-infallible organizations?
On a personal note, my father was a government officer for thirty years. He had a vehicle (first a jeep, then a van and finally a car) allotted for his use throughout his career. He never used it for any personal work. Not once did he allow any of his children to enter the vehicle, leave alone taking a ride in it. I am sure even today there are many officers who follow a similar set of values. Maybe old-fashioned, may be belonging to a different era - but till the end, he could sleep like a child - with a clear conscience.
How do you inculcate value systems in an organization or in a society?
The Ethics of Resume Writing
The Ethical Leader's Decision Tree
The Call for Authentic Leadership
People who read this also read:
- John Quelch
- Scott Anthony
- Darrell Rigby
- Marshall Goldsmith
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About this Author
B V Krishnamurthy is the Director and Executive Vice-President of Alliance Business Academy in Bangalore, India, where he is also the ASI Distinguished Professor of Strategy and International Business. An engineer with post-graduate degrees in industrial management, systems engineering and business administration, and a doctoral degree in strategy, he has worked in corporations in Europe and Asia for 23 years (his last stint as CEO of a consortium) before entering academia in 1998. BVK also teaches in business schools in the USA, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Russia.
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