Institutionalizing Ethics in Organisations

Name: Ejas Mudar Reg No: 0116/49

Institutionalizing ethics in organizations can help in greatly increasing the ethical behaviour of the company. This can be done by setting up guidelines for decision making and corporate behaviour, and by including ethical behaviour as one of the guiding principles of the organization. Crash course in ethical corporate behaviour can also be made mandatory for all new employees. Once a week every year can be designated as ethical behaviour week, and activities can be undertaken to emphasise the importance of ethics in the company.

An example of institutionalising ethics is establishing whistle-blower protection as part of the official rules. This helps in increasing the ethical behaviour of the employees as they have a guarantee against harassment in case they speak out about unethical behaviour in the company. This in turn ensures that the risk for behaving unethically in the organisation goes up as anyone can speak out about that unethical behaviour and be protected. Thus the overall ethical behaviour of the company is increased.

Another example is setting up an office of ombudsman or vigilance officer as a tool to fight corruption and unethical behaviour. This also involves setting up formal procedures to deal with complaints, both internal and external, investigations, punitive actions, etc.

Apart from these examples, organisations can also develop guidelines for decision making and behaviour for both extraordinary occasions as well as ordinary occasions. A few examples of ordinary occasions are dealing with suppliers, dealing with clients, evaluating tenders, dealing with workplace inappropriate behaviour, extent of transparency in transactions, etc. Extraordinary occasions include dealing with lawsuits from clients, or suppliers or even employees.

The existence of these guidelines make ethical decision making easy and justifiable to all stakeholders. For example, in case a manager takes a decision to stop working with a particular supplier due to unethical practices off the supplier, it is very easy for the manager to justify himself if there existed a guideline which said that the company will not deal with unethical suppliers. In the absence of such a guideline, the manager would not be able to justify himself easily and extensive time would be wasted in investigating and deliberating over the issue.