Ethics and Stress

Ethics and Stress

The business world has changed over the last 30 years. Thanks to technology, organizations now have access to archives of data, unavailable to older generations, to assist them in making the hard decisions. Unfortunately, technology has also added its own difficulty. Business organizations must now contend with complicated ethical decisions and mounting work-related stress in order to be successful.

In the past, organizations could operate in moderate obscurity due to employee and media loyalty. The tobacco companies are one example. For decades, “big tobacco” was responsible for clouding the health issue with false information and bogus research. “Tobacco companies sought to create doubt where scientific consensus existed” (Yach, 2001). Their tactics included “fund[ing], directly or indirectly, prestigious academic centers and scientists in its effort to achieve scientific credibility” and distorting risk by downplaying the affects of smoking (Yach, 2001). Yet, this industry was able to knowingly sell harmful products to their consumers with little regard for the damage their product was doing to the health of their consumers.

Technology, specifically the Internet, has allowed law enforcement, special interest groups, researchers, media, and individuals to collect information on organizations who might be acting unethically. For this reason, companies are taking a long hard look at ethics in the workplace and in some instances, creating senior management positions specifically intended to watch for unethical activity. “In addition, many organizations now have ethics codes that spell out how employees are expected to behave in circumstances that may present ethical quandaries and dilemmas” (Schermerhorn et al, 2005).

Still this does not stop unethical behavior from happening. Just in the past few years, we have seen numerous scandals involving unethical behavior. The scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, Quest, Adelphia, and many others...