Denning (2011) breaks ethical communities down into three components: trust, loyalty, and solidarity. Trust is defined as the general expectation that all employees will behave ethically towards each other. Loyalty refers to excepting obligation and refraining from breaking others trust. Solidarity means caring for other people and acting on their behalf. These three components are very important in a company, and without them employees are not likely to stay for very long. They lay down the framework in which the communities are built.
There is a distinction between instrumental values and ethical values. Whetten and Cameron (2011) define instrumental values as the standard of conduct or methods for attaining an end while ethical decision-making is described as a set of moral principals used when making decisions. Denning (2011) lays out a test for determining a company’s moral values by listening to the words they use. If the words are people oriented then they are most likely a moral company, if they view employees as a means to and end then they are not as morally sound.
Inside a company, the leader is the one who imposes ethics on their staff. Yukl (2013) stated that a key characteristic in ethical leadership was a leader’s efforts to influence the ethical behavior of others. Yukl (2013) also defines integrity as honesty and consistency between a person’s embraced values and behavior. Not all employees are going to buy into the company’s values and beliefs and this can create tension. Some employees will see and accept the gap in values and continue on, others will make the decision to leave the company. Those that remain will either grow increasingly pessimistic about the company or choose to rise above and act with their own higher ethical standards.
When a company looks to be broken from the top down the bottom of the pile has to either step up or move on. This was the case with my last employer. The upper management was nonresponsive to our department’s requests for changes and, as a result, we could either pass the blame onto the department that was at fault in front of the customer or we could smile and try to make things right. For the majority of our staff, the correct or ethical thing to do was to smile and make it right. We each created a standard of our own and that was the standard we maintained, even with little to no support from above. As the supervisor in my department, I held my staff to the higher standard of our department rather than the lower standard of the upper management, and as a result we were routinely in the top two in departmental rankings from guest surveys. We could have lowered ourselves and aligned with the “Oh well, its someone else’s fault, not ours” mentality, however, that would not have fixed the issue at hand. I still live by the rule that it may not be my fault but at the moment it is my problem and I will find a way to fix it. I apply this to both my personal and profession life every day.
Denning, S. (2011). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and
Discipline of Business Narrative. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons/Jossey-Bass.
Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing Management Skills (E. Svendsen
Ed. 8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Yukl, G. (2013). Leadership in organizations (8th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
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