Organizational behavior is influenced by culture. Culture is crucial in the pursuit for more ethical workplace behavior because it helps to normalize ethical behavior and uphold it in interactions with internal and external stakeholders. This justification ought to be enough to make developing and sustaining an ethical culture a top priority (Schoeman, 2017).
A strong ethical culture can reduce the likelihood of ethical lapses as well as the negative costs and effects that result from unethical behavior. A wide spectrum of expenses is shown by the numerous high-profile ethical violations. Large financial expenditures have been incurred by businesses as a result of penalties or legal settlements. Reputational costs have included everything from diminished trust in an organization to a downturn in its stock price. In other cases, the expense has also resulted in business shutdown (Schoeman, 2017).
There are different elements that are employed by managers in different organizations to establish a strong ethical culture that guides the behavior of employees in an organization.
Some of these components are commonly known or already present in organizations, making them not particularly challenging, while others are either inadequately or never addressed, necessitating specific attention. These elements used in shaping an ethical culture include:
- Leadership Commitment: Most, if not all, organizations would agree that the leaders of the organization must be committed to establishing an ethical culture, and that the achievement of this goal depends on their ongoing, active attention. This part shouldn't be challenging, but without this backing, the organization's ability to transform its culture is likely to be restricted to certain areas. In this regard managers are to lead by example in exercising the culture that is needed for the organization
- Creating Ethical Standards: Codifying ethical standards is a component of the ethics management system that the majority of organizations have already handled. This usually takes the shape of an ethics code, a conduct code, and any supplementary regulations relating to ethics. An ethical culture that establishes what is and is not acceptable depends critically on the efficacy of an organization's ethical norms. Its performance depends on a number of elements, including that the standards be understood by all parties involved, that they be applied equally to everyone, and that—as with point 1 above—leaders at all levels demonstrate an unshakeable dedication to the company's principles (Schoeman, 2017).
- Establishing ethical goals and strategies: A key step in creating an ethical culture is defining the organization's ethical goal(s) and supporting strategy. The endeavors to alter or improve the culture run the risk of being disorganized or without focus in the absence of a clearly stated, ideal ethical goal. The creation and upkeep of an ethical culture would seem to be the apparent ethical goal. But this is frequently absent from an organization's vision, mission, or strategic objectives, and it should be. Therefore, Managers must create ethical goals and strategies that are to be communicated to employees (Schoeman, 2017).
- Providing Ethics awareness and understanding among employees: Typically, an ethics program's ethical awareness function is underutilized. Nonetheless, having a high level of ethical knowledge is important for creating an ethical culture, not the least because it acts as a strong deterrent to wrongdoing. Innovative, captivating awareness campaigns and consistent communication can help with this. Yet mere awareness is insufficient; comprehension of ethics is also essential. There are many ways to acquire a solid understanding of ethics, but training is essential. It is obvious that the training must be pertinent to the tasks, duties, and ethical dilemmas faced by the personnel. Employee involvement is particularly necessary because the desired result is not just comprehension but also a stronger commitment to ethics, which is essential for the development of an ethical culture (Schoeman, 2017).
- Ethical recognition and reward among employees: Since that ethical behavior is fundamental to an ethical culture, it’s worth should be acknowledged. Using employee recognition programs that include ethical behaviors or ethical principles among their nomination requirements, such as employee of the month, makes this simple to do. Directly rewarding ethics carries a number of dangers. Paying someone to perform ethically is not always a good idea. Yet by include ethical behaviors or ethical principles as performance indicators in a performance management system, ethics can be recognized and rewarded. This increases the company's ethical standards, maintains ethical awareness, and strives to shape behavior, all of which add support to establishing and preserving an ethical culture. This reinforces ethics as a component of excellent performance (Schoeman, 2017).
- Ethics Assessment and Reporting among Employees: Regularly assessing ethics to give an accurate, representative picture of the organization's ethical status is a crucial step and a good place to start in the quest of an ethical culture. But evaluating ethics is frequently done poorly or not at all. When businesses monitor and evaluate other important metrics like sales, expenses, safety, or profitability, they may neglect to monitor what's most important for overall success: ethical behavior and the degree to which ethics is applied to stakeholders (Schoeman, 2017).
Schoeman, C. (2017). Creating an ethical culture in your organization.