Why do ethical issues occur

Ethical issues are challenging because they are difficult to deal with if no guidelines or precedents are known. For this reason, many professional and industry associations have ethical codes that are discussed and approved by key participants to provide a useful framework for companies and individuals to make adequate decisions whenever they face one of these conflicts. He currently overseas ten different states within the U. He travels very frequently to visit each of these states to meet with clients and help representatives to close deals.

Your best response is to maintain your personal values and repel such intolerant, unethical or illegal group norms by offering an alternative, inclusive perspective as the best choice for the group and the organization. Your organization sets a goal—it could be a monthly sales figure or product production number—that seems unrealistic, even unattainable.

Unrealistic objectives can spur leaders to put undue pressure on their employees, and employees may consider cutting corners or breaching ethical or legal guidelines to obtain them. Cutting corners ethically is a shortcut that rarely pays off, and if your entire team or department is failing to meet goals, company leadership needs that feedback to revisit those goals and re-evaluate performance expectations.

While this may feel like a minor blip in the grand scheme of workplace ethics, the improper use of the internet and company technology is a huge cost for organizations in lost time, worker productivity and company dollars.

Not all ethical breaches are as dramatic as those that make headlines, but all ethical violations are wrong nonetheless. When you find yourself faced with an unethical situation or leader, think about what you value most as an individual and as a professional to guide your response.

Knowing when to say when can be a personal ethical dilemma unto itself. Fill out the form to get program details and access to valuable resources. An infamous example of this was the scandal with American oil giant Enron, which was exposed for inaccurately reporting its financial statements for years, with its accounting firm Arthur Andersen signing off on statements despite them being incorrect.

In response to this case, as well as other major corporate scandals, the U. Federal Government established the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in , which mandates new financial reporting requirements meant to protect consumers and shareholders. Even small privately held companies must keep accurate financial records to pay appropriate taxes and employee profit-sharing, or to attract business partners and investments.

Many employers are at risk of current and former employees stealing information, including client data used by organizations in direct competition with the company.

When intellectual property is stolen, or private client information is illegally distributed, this constitutes corporate espionage. Companies may put in place mandatory nondisclosure agreements, stipulating strict financial penalties in case of violation, in order to discourage these types of ethics violations.

Under the same umbrella as nondisclosure agreements, the developments in technological security capability pose privacy concerns for clients and employees alike. Employers now have the ability to monitor employee activity on their computers and other company-provided devices, and while electronic surveillance is meant to ensure efficiency and productivity, it often comes dangerously close to privacy violation.

The key to using technological surveillance in an ethical manner is transparency. In order to ensure employee surveillance does not turn into an ethical issue for your business, both employees and employers should remain conscious of the actual benefits of being monitored, and whether it is a useful way of developing a record of their job performance.

Avoiding ethical issues in business always starts with top management. Providing clearly written policies and processes that ensure those policies are both acknowledged and adhered to, can ensure transparency and ethical business practices are applied. In order to effectively detect and, most importantly, deter ethical issues in business from surfacing in your organization, there are several everyday efforts you can take. Be sure to communicate and enforce a robust code of ethics when making decisions and ask the same of your employees.

Remain aware of the discrimination laws that exist in your region. It is psychologically unsafe to speak up. The second is the natural fear that speaking up will lead to retribution or harsh reactions. There is excessive pressure to reach unrealistic performance targets. Significant research from Harvard Business School suggests unfettered goal setting can encourage people to make compromising choices in order to reach targets, especially if those targets seem unrealistic.

Leaders may be inviting people to cheat in two ways. They will cut corners on the way they reach a goal, or they will lie when reporting how much of the goal they actually achieved. The Veterans Administration learned this lesson the hard way when trying to address the day wait time in their Phoenix hospital.

They set a new goal of reducing the wait to 14 days, which resulted in an alleged day wait. But employees said they felt compelled to manipulate performance records to give the appearance of meeting these goals.