Com525 Ethics

Cultural Values and Personal Ethics

Week Four – Cultural Values and Personal Ethics

Robert Keyser

Managerial Communication and Ethics (COM 525)

Kim Hinton

July 21, 2004

Abstract

Decisions are made every day. There are many elements that can assist or interfere with those decisions. Personal, organizational, and cultural values play an important role in which decisions are made in our personal and professional environments. Research of related articles along with personal experiences will be analyzed to better understand these elements. These elements and the impact they have on our personal and professional lives will be discussed.

Cultural Values and Personal Ethics

Personal, organizational, and cultural values drive our decision-making behavior. These three values at times may even be difficult to distinguish from one another because they overlap with each other. In many cases, a change in one of these values will cause a ripple affect on the other two if they are not similar. Since these values are generally not flexible, conflicts are likely to arise when there are differences in these values. It is possible that our values may change based on life-long experiences and our ability to view things from other perspectives, otherwise referred to as a paradigm shift. (Covey, 1989) Values are not the reality of how things are, but are how we believe things should be. Events in our lives may alter our values and change the way by which we understand things.

We no longer hang people at high noon, or stone them to death for wrong-doing. We may have done these years ago but our life long experiences has altered our thinking and now make us believe that this is not the right thing to do. Again, our values are represented as what we believe to be right from wrong, or how we believe things should be. Our values and the changes in these...