Ethical Dilemmas

Ethical Dilemmas

1. Organizational Justice

   • Privacy
     • Confidentiality
       • Trust
         • Ethical Self - Assessment
           • Many features of the organization's structure can hinder the flow of information within the organization. Furthermore the internal dynamics of individual advancement within organizations may also completely ruin the flow of information. When individuals with differential experience attempt to escape responsibility for negative outcomes and take credit for positive outcomes, information is increasingly skewed and non-specific. This means that corporate managers cannot fulfill their duty to ensure that their company works, both ethically and lawfully, simply by evaluating the information that enters their desks. They must constantly obtain the information required to provide an accurate image of what is happening within their organization. This helps companies to escape organizational blocks by heading straight to the information source and to overcome the obscuring effects of self-interest by ensuring that workers can not use their statements to counsel against them at a later time.
             • These systems help corporate managers to collect the information required to avoid or fix ethical or legal violations.
         • Employees clearly have an interest in granting procedural justice and protecting their privacy and preserving trust. But if the company wishes to escape prosecution and the possibility of significantly improved criminal punishment, it must surrender those rights to the government's interest in an effective investigation and punishment of the crime. Under the Organizational Sentencing Rules, assuming a duty to protect the rights of workers, companies are obliged to surrender score decreases for successful enforcement and cooperative programs and to face a possible rise in obstruction of justice. It requires an organization and its employees to refrain from creating or allowing false perceptions as to how the organization will act with respect to its employees. The more managers trust their workers and refrain from directly observing their actions, the easier it becomes for irresponsible employees to commit criminal offenses for which the company is responsible.
       • The promise ethically commits the second party to do so if one party reveals information to a second, only because the latter promises to keep the information confidential. Confidentiality is important on a functional level to promote the flow of knowledge through the organization. It is only by promising confidentiality that organizations can ensure that their leadership receives the information required for them to work not only efficiently, but also ethically and lawfully. First, as a means of gathering sensitive information that otherwise would not be forthcoming, organizations often create lines of communication that circumvent the ordinary corporate chain of command, such as employee hotlines.
         • Second, in order to gather the information required both to protect the company from civil and criminal prosecution and to ensure that the organization complies with the law, companies require their workers to provide information to corporate counsel under the protection of the attorney-client privilege. Such a promise would be patently self-defeating because it's basically saying that the organization will keep the information confidential unless it is in the organization’s interest to disclose it, which is the same as saying it will not keep the information confidential at all.
     • Privacy has a legal and ethical dimension. The constitutional right to privacy protects people from intervention by the state and federal governments in certain private decisions and actions, and the common law protects them against certain invasions of their private domains and against unauthorized disclosure of private information by their citizens. From the point of view of stakeholders and social contracts, the rights of workers to privacy in the workplace come either from the duty of the company to uphold the integrity of stakeholder groups, including employees, or from the specific term of the social contract between society and business organizations. Companies have an ethical duty to protect the privacy of workers because in doing so, they create a workforce that performs better and is more committed to the success of the company, as is the preservation of organizational justice.
   • Organizational justice refers to employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace. These perceptions can be classified into four categories: distributive, procedural, informational, and interactional. One aspect of this study is how the fairness in which workers are treated and considered to be treated influences both employee and organizational success. This study shows that companies committed to ensuring procedural justice to their workers have employees who are more pleased with their jobs and who display a higher degree of dedication to business objectives. It help to bear the expense of their protection and to keep them in their positions until their guilt or innocence is confirmed.