Lecture 21

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Collegiality and Loyalty, Respect for
Authority, Collective Bargaining,
Confidentiality, Conflicts of Interest,
Occupational Crime

Course Code: 316

BTech Final Year
Course Instructor: Dr. K M RAO
 Confidentiality
It is an important responsibility of an employee or an engineer to
maintain the confidentiality of the organization or the employer
 Confidentiality means keeping the information on/of the employer
and clients, as secrets. It is one of the important aspects of team work
 Confidentialitymeans that professionals should not tell other people
personal things about you, unless you say they can. Or if it is
absolutely necessary
 When the word confidential is added to any information, it means
that it should not be shared with one and all. It is mostly a trade
secret.
 Maintaining confidentiality and avoiding harmful conflicts of interest
are important aspects of teamwork and trustworthiness
Justification for Confidentiality
Confidentiality can be justified by various ethical theories.
 Rights-based theory: rights of the stakeholders, right to the intellectual
property of the company are protected by this practice.
 Duty theory: employees and employers have duty to keep up mutual trust
 Utilitarian
theory: holds good, only when confidentiality produce most
good to most people.
 Act utilitarian theory: focuses on each situation, when the employer decides
on some matters as confidential.
Changing jobs

The obligation to protect confidential information does not cease when employees
change jobs. The former employees are bound by moral rules and are not supposed
to indulge in revealing or selling such information to the new employers. An
employee may change his job for his personal financial or career-oriented growth.
But that should never effect the old company, which he used to work for.
An engineer’s knowledge base generates an intuitive sense of what designs will
work and will not work, and trade secrets form part of this knowledge base. It is
usually considered a better deal, if the employee is not allowed to change the job
until the project finishes; this helps in avoiding unnecessary revelation of
information
Types of information
There are two types of confidential information:
Privileged Information: Privileged information means “available only
on the basis of special privilege” such as a privilege accorded an
employee working on a special assignment
Proprietary information: Proprietary information is the information
that a company owns or is the proprietor of, and hence is a term
carefully defined by property law. It is simply called trade secret.
There are also instances in which a breach in confidentiality is
acceptable. That is, when there is serious concern threat to the safety
of the company or others. An example may be when a psychiatrist
hears from a patient that they want to commit a specific, violent act
 Conflicts of Interest
A conflict of interest occurs when an individual becomes unreliable
because of a clash between personal (or self-serving) interests and
professional duties or responsibilities.
 Sucha conflict occurs when a company or person has a vested interest—
such as money, status, knowledge, relationships, or reputation—which
puts into question whether their actions, judgment, and/or decision-
making can be unbiased.
 When such a situation arises, the party is usually asked to remove
themselves, and it is often legally required of them
Understanding Conflict of Interest
 A conflict of interest in business normally refers to a situation in which
an individual's personal interests conflict with the professional interests
owed to their employer or the company in which they are invested.
A conflict of interest arises when a person chooses personal gain over
the duties to an organization in which they are a stakeholder or exploits
their position for personal gain in some way
 All corporate board members have fiduciary duties and a duty of
loyalty to the corporations they oversee. If one of the directors chooses
to take action that benefits them at the detriment of the firm, they are
harming the company with a conflict of interest. A fiduciary is a person or
organization that acts on behalf
of another person or persons,
putting their clients' interests
ahead of their own, with a duty
to preserve good faith and trust
Subtle situations with various conflicts of interests:
A bribe is a substantial amount of money or goods offered
beyond a stated business contract with the aim of winning an
advantage in gaining or keeping the contract and where the
advantage is unfair or otherwise unethical.
 Giftscan be small gratuities offered in the normal conduct of
business.
 Prearranged payments made by contractors to companies or
their representatives in exchange for contracts actually granted
are called Kickbacks.
 If the money or gifts offered are substantial enough to threaten
the fairness of competitive situations, then such gifts turn out
to be bribes.
Interest in other companies
 An Employee while working in his company, if supports another
company, during his leisure time to earn more or for some other
career aspects, can be understood as committing an immoral act.
Such an act is called Moonlighting which usually creates conflicts of
interests. Instances creating such conflicts can be working for
competitors, suppliers or customers.
 The want of additional income or the need for personal and
professional growth might foster one to pursue such ideas, which
usually creates problems. A special kind of conflict of interest arises,
however, when moonlighting leaves one exhausted and thereby
harms the job performance.
THANK YOU