Why Businesses Fail to Manage Ethics in the Workplace?

The majority of the company including international and local organizations starts to alert and concentrate on the importance of business ethics between managements and employees. One of the major challenges in business ethics is creating a safe environment where all employees or workers can raise their concerns about possible misconduct and wrongdoing. Business ethics has been an essential but difficult subject to handle. Many business organizations recognize the importance of business ethics but do not give it due attention. One the contrary, some organizations have simply provided the fundamental business ethic course which involves learning what is right or wrong and doing the right thing.

Businesses Fail to Manage Ethics in the Workplace

In the reality, some of the organizations have failed to manage the business ethics in the workplace. The major elements which affect the business failure mainly identified and divided into six different types of categories including gender diversity, sexual harassment, lack of communication, age discrimination, racial discrimination and lack of corporate social responsibility.

1. Gender Diversity

The gender diversity obviously refers to lack of a good balance of both men and women in the work place. The majority of companies tend to be more partial towards one gender for specific positions. For instance, companies may prefer hiring either only men or more men than women in departments and division. Thus, the lack of diversity of having women would be generally happened in the work place. By doing the male principle in a work place, the company may not only miss out on qualified female candidates, it is not possible to fully grow into a vibrant and diverse entity with different views and perspectives which could normally do wonders to the marketing of services and products. Therefore, diversity can enhance the environment.

The workplace such as maintenance workshops, hardware shops etc. has generally had clear boundaries when it comes to gender. On the managerial grade, the majority of men are typically positioned in the leadership and higher paying job. On the contrary, many of women are hired for the subordinate positions. Thus, the gender diversity in the workplace is minimal. While the glass ceiling is still happened in the reality, there are some circumstances which are obviously a huge barrier for women’s career path. Even while hiring, many companies prefer men to women employees though most often they don’t divulge this attitude when they advertise for the job opening. This is mainly done of the pretext that the health care requirements and social responsibilities of a woman are different than a man. Therefore, this is often viewed as a hurdle against women performance at workplace.

Therefore, businesses need to be proactive and educated themselves to prevent age bias claims. There is no time like the present to evaluate current employment policies. Simple solution and action taken could include keeping abreast of all record, keeping requirements and reviewing business policies to ensure that they are neutral. Other solutions such as retaining payroll and keeping benefit plan records for terminated employees would be the way for the gender diversity.

2. Sexual Harassment

While the sexual harassment on female employees is prevalent in the workplace, it is either not report or ignored for female employees. The majority of female victims would keep quite due to fear of social ridicule and fear of losing the jobs. Sexual harassment is an expression of sexism that reflects and reinforces the unequal power that exists between men and women in our society. It is unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior that interferes in workplace. While the negative comments on one’s gender is among the more common forms of sexual harassment, it is essentially a problem that has many manifestations. Moreover, verbal sexual harassment should include the term of insults, racist comments and invasive questions.

According to the official web-site of equal opportunity commission, there are many of causes about sex discrimination, sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and disability discrimination in the workplace. One of the sexual harassment causes should be discussed and analyzed during the workplace between female and male. The sexual harassment definitely makes the workplace environment not harmonious.

3. Lack of Communication

Misunderstanding between management and employees is one of the common causes to fail the management ethics in the workplace. The term of lack of communication mainly adds to the confusion inside the organizations and is responsible for increased workplace pressure. Most of the employees in the workplace have had a poor internal communication as a source of pressure. A flexible organization has only become possible because of new communication technology. An effective organization should reply on informal and formal bridging mechanisms which establish direct communication channel platform between managements and employees including electronic based communication and review meetings.

4. Discrimination

Discrimination in a workplace is obviously seen and refers to any instance of treating someone in a less favorable manner on the basis of that person’s characteristics all over the world. Although everyone has the equal opportunities and human rights, various forms of discriminatory behavior have persisted in a workplace including age discrimination and racial discrimination.

  1. Age discrimination in a workplace:  Age discrimination in the workplace refers to discriminatory and harassment acts against workers or employees who are 40 years old and above. Age has investigated in the context of performance evaluation in a number of workplace, demonstrating a negative age performance rating relationship. While considerable research has been conducted on age and performance in organizations as noted, little progress has been made in explaining the processes and dynamics underlying the observed negative correlations. The biggest key factor influencing the age performance correlation is the type of performance measure used. For instance, when objective productivity indices are use, there is a pattern of increases in performance as age increased. Therefore, when the managerial supervisor ratings of performance are used, there is a tendency for ratings to be lower for older employees.
  2. Racial discrimination in a workplace:  Racial discrimination in a workplace is an everyday experience of the ethnic minorities living all over the world. The minority of people who are low educated and skilled workers report lower wages and poorer working conditions on their ethnic background. A word of discrimination means unequal treatment. One of the most common elements discriminated against is the person ethnicity or the race. This is called racial discrimination. According to the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of all form of Racial Discrimination, discrimination means “any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin, which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment, or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.” Thus when the ethnic minorities do not enjoy human rights and freedom on an equal basis with the rest of society, they are discriminated against. It is important to note that discrimination which need not be intended.

5. Lack of Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is social responsibility as applied to business. It involves businesses acting in accordance with social principles. The CSR could mainly come in the form of philanthropy and involves the appliance of business ethics in determining business policy. Corporate social responsibility can be defined as the obligation companies have to develop and implement courses of action that aid in social issues that impact society. The term of corporate social responsibility is used by corporations to signify several topics including legal responsibility, fiduciary duty, legitimacy and charitable contributions.

Base on the shareholder approach as the classical view on CSR, the corporate social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. The shareholder is the focal profit of the company and socially responsible activities which don’t belong to the domain of organization. This approach can be interpreted as business enterprises being concerned with corporate social responsibility.

A company should have equipped a positive social awareness, environmental and economic impacts in the community where they do or open business trading in all over the world. Therefore, the corporate social responsibility is a way of doing business. Moreover, the corporate social responsibility is a useful instrument to help achieve its performance objectives defined in terms of profitability, return on investment or sales volume. For a business, different kinds of measurements are taken in consideration to classify a business as corporate social responsibility. Each kind of business tries to attempts and reaches the different goals.

The positive duty suggests that businesses in corporate social responsibility may be self-motivated to have a positive impact regardless of social pressures calling for social initiatives. When this positive duty is happened, the corporate social responsibility principles are a component of the firm’s true identity, expressing values considered by organizational, central and enduring. On the contrary, the negative duty suggests that businesses in corporate social responsibility are compelled to adopt social responsibility initiatives in order to conform to stakeholder norms defining appropriate behavior. When this negative duty is happened, the self-motivation is replaced by corporate social responsibility initiatives that are a reaction to what is expected from stakeholders.

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