Ethical Issues in Human Resources

1. Ethical issues in Employment.

2. Ethical issues in HR Development.
3. Ethical issues in Wage & Salary
administration.
Employment: Employment is a contract between
two parties, one being the employer and the
other being the employee.
HR Development: Human Resource Development
(HRD) is the framework for helping employees
develop their personal and organizational skills,
knowledge, and abilities.
Wages & salary administration: wage and salary
admin is the group of activities involved in the
development, implementation and maintenance
of a pay system.
Ethical Issues in Employment:
Job Design: To achieve the organizational goals, the activities which are
needed to be done in an order and which requires the use of techniques
and organizational analysis.
Human Resource Planning: In words of E.W., a process by which an
organization should move from its current manpower position to its
desired manpower position. Through planning, management strives to
have the right number and right kind of people of the right places of the
right time, doing things which results in both the organization and the
individual receiving maximum long-run benefit.
Recruitment and Selection: By, Edwin B. Flippo, the process of
searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for
jobs in the organization.
Choosing the most appropriate candidates and offering them jobs is
called as Selection.
Ethics in Job Design:
1. Work Simplification (Work is over-simplified)
2. Job Rotation (movement of an employee from one job
to the another)
3. Job Enlargement (horizontal loading of the job)
4. Job Enrichment (vertical loading of the job)
5. Autonomous work teams (involves employees in
decision making)
6. High Performance work teams (provides complete
freedom to workers)
7. Empowerment (delegating authority, providing skills to
carry out higher level jobs)
8. De-jobbing (environment results in flexible job design)
Ethical Issues in Human Resource development:

Performance Appraisal: The process of performance appraisal helps the
employees and the management to know the level of employees
performance compared to the standard/pre-determined level.

Training and Development: Training is the art of increasing the knowledge
and skill of an employee doing a particular job. It is defined as the
organized procedure by which people learn knowledge and/or skill for a
definite purpose.

Career planning & Development: Process by which one selects career goals
and path to achieve the goals. Career planning and development of
employees are the responsibilities of both individual employee and
management. Discharging ones own responsibility amounts to ethical act.
Similarly, shirking from ones own responsibility is deemed as unethical.

Promotion: Promotion is the upward reassignment of an individual in an
organizations hierarchy, accompanied by increased responsibilities,
enhanced status and usually with increased income though not always.
Contd.
Employee Turnover: Employee retention rate should high
because traditionally, business used to believe that the
employee stability with one organization, enhances his
skills and organization gets the advantage of employee
loyalty and commitment. Further, organizations preferred
employee stability with them as they invested lot of money
on employee training and development.
When technologies, systems and structures have been
changing at a faster rate, employees prefer to join the fast
growing organizations, learn the latest technologies and
managerial practices. These shifts helps the employees to
add to the knowledge, skills and value to their existing
human resources.
The HR strategies to retain the employees for longer
periods cannot be viewed as ethical.
Ethical Issues in Wage and Salary Administration:
The features of the wage/salary policies include: minimization of
wage/salary inequalities, reduction of the gap between the highest and
the lowest wage, payment of the equal wage/salary to all the employees
doing the same job irrespective of their hob performance. The payment of
Bonus Act 1965 insists for the payment of a minimum bonus at the rate of
8.33 percent of the annual basic pay of the employee irrespective of profit
or loss of the company.
A number of questions arise regarding the ethical issues in
wage/salary/bonus payment which include: Is it ethical to pay the same
wage/salary to an employee who makes the least contribution and to
another employee who makes the highest and significant contribution to
the job?
Another question is: is it ethical to legally force a loss-making
company to pay 8.33 percent bonus? Is it also ethical to pay bonus equally
to all employees without considering their contributions? These issues
seems to be unethical from the larger interest of the survival and
development of the company and from the interest of the employees
contributing significantly.