Ethics

Ethics Audit

Today's culture leads us to countless questions and concerns about our personal ideas and values. Many organizations have become increasingly aware of their behavior in recent years. In their book, Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How To Do It Right, Trevino and Nelson blame this awareness on the revised sentencing guidelines done by the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2004, which dictates that more attention needs to be focused on the organization’s ethical culture. The world has now been divided into persons talking for themselves rather than society coming together in a unified way. In the past society has given us situations that have been used to set regulations and boundaries for everyone. Most organizations have become continually faced with an ethical dilemma over one’s rights and beliefs and usually have a passive reaction to the ethics and beliefs of everyone, in other words, anything goes in some places.

Formal or Informal

Each organization should have a way to address ethical issues as they arise. The plan should be laid out, maybe not specifically, because each organization has different issues and different ways of handling the issues. The organization in which I work has pretty much a mixture of both, but mainly informal with an extremely weak organizational culture. According to the text, a weak organizational culture is described as one where the subcultures within the unit are the guides for the organization’s behavior. There are several units in the organization, and each unit has its own policies or none at all, which basically supports unethical behavior.

The process of enculturation that the organization follows in regards to new employees is disorganized from the very beginning. New employees are not trained by upper management, but by their peers; who were not formally trained themselves, and in most cases a totally different set of rules are followed by each individual, therefore, almost...