Ethics at Work

256 Pages·2000·11.44 MB·English

by  Barbara Goodwin (auth.)

ETHICS AT WORK
Issues in Business Ethics
VOLUME 16
Series Editors
Henk van Luijk, Emeritus Professor ofB usiness Ethics
Patricia Werhane, University of Virginia, U.S.A.
Editorial Board
Brenda Almond, University ofH ull, Hull, u.K.
Antonio Argandofia, lESE, Barcelona, Spain
William C. Frederick, University ofP ittsburgh, U.S.A.
Georges Enderle, University ofN otre Dame, U.S.A.
Norman E. Bowie, University ofM innesota, U.S.A.
Brian Harvey, Manchester Business School, U.K.
Horst Steinmann, University ofE rlangen-Nurnberg, Nurnberg, Germany
The titles published in this series are listed at the end oft his volume.
Ethics at Work
by
BARBARA GOODWIN
Professor ofP olitics,
University ofE ast Anglia, Norwich
Visiting Senior Research Fellow,
Henley Management College
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4020-0363-9 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-9331-6
001: 10.1007/978-94-010-9331-6
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© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st 2000
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Paul Branton
Philosopher and Ergonomist
ETmCS AT WORK
Contents
1. MORAL QUESTIONS 1
2. ETHOS OR CODE? 7
The Participating Organisations -The Public Service Ethos -Codes of Conduct -
Conclusions
3. PERSONAL MORALITY AT WORK 55
Ethical Issues - Moral Beliefs - Dilemmas and Conflicts at Work -
WhistIeblowing - Conclusions
4. TOPICAL ETHICAL QUESTIONS 117
Ethics and Democracy - Equal Opportunities and Discrimination - The Ethical
Role of Unions - Privatisation and Ethics
5. RESPONSIBILITY AT WORK 145
Problems of Responsibility - Perceptions of Responsibility - Individual
Responsibility and Organisational Structure
6. THE MORAL ORGANISATION 183
Perceptions of the Organisations - Attitudes to Empowerment - The Value of
Procedures - What Makes a Moral Organisation?
APPENDIX 235
REFERENCES 241
INDEX 245
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people and institutions have helped me to achieve this book. I would like to thank
the Society for the Furtherance of Critical Philosophy for awarding me a Paul Branton
Research Fellowship to allow me to undertake the research; Dr Rene Saran and Dr Pat
Shipley, Trustees of the Society, commented very helpfully on my work, encouraged
me and gave me many ideas. Brunei University allowed me leave of absence to carry
out the fieldwork and the University of East Anglia has also given me leave in order to
complete the writing of the book. Henley Management College made me a Visiting
Senior Research Fellow for the duration of the work and Professor Pat Joynt there
offered many useful comments on the case studies which were published as Henley
Working Papers.
I particularly want to thank all the people who participated in the study and shared their
views frankly with me; also, my sincere thanks go to the eight organisations which
allowed me to work with them. I have discussed the project with academic colleagues
too numerous to mention at conferences and seminars, especially those organised by the
European Business Studies Network (EBEN-UK) and the Centre for Organisational and
Professional Ethics (at Brunei and Buckingham College), and I am grateful for their
comments and friendly criticisms. Two of my former colleagues at Brunei, Professor
Christopher Pollitt (now at Erasmus University) and the late John Quinn, were
especially encouraging and helpful. My special thanks go to my husband, Michael
Miller, for his moral support during the project and for many challenging discussions
on ethics and responsibility. I am immeasurably in his debt for designing and operating
numerous editing macros, and for taking charge of converting the text and index into
camera-ready copy for publication.
Barbara Goodwin
University of East Ang/ia
Norwich
April 2000
CHAPTER 1
MORAL QUESTIONS
Responsibility, accountability and ethics have loomed large in public debate in Europe
and the USA in the last two decades. Opinion-formers, such as the media, religious
leaders and politicians, have claimed that people have lost the sense of personal and
social responsibility and that ethical standards are slipping. This book sets out to
examine these claims in the context of ethics in the workplace. It is based on original
research undertaken in eight business and public-sector organisations based in, or with
major operations in, the UK.
This is not an ethical audit; its purpose is not to examine the ethical standing of each
organisation as a whole. For that one would need to consult customers, competitors,
suppliers and others and to create many indices of ethical behaviour. Instead, this offers
a perspective on the organisations through the eyes of their staff, both managers and
other employees. The purpose of the research was not to provide an ethical snapshot of
particular organisations at a particular time but to explore the attitudes and perceptions
of individual people, which are probably more enduring. The book's main objective is
to answer two closely linked questions: how do people working in large, bureaucratic
organisations view their personal responsibilities and how do they resolve moral
dilemmas when their personal beliefs are at odds with the immediate requirements of
their work or with the organisation's policies in general? It is appropriate to investigate
these questions together because personal responsibility and substantive moral beliefs
are both aspects of moral understanding.
Individuals enter the public sphere when taking on public roles as employees. As
private persons, they usually have moral and political beliefs and opinions. How do they
react to the morally difficult situations sometimes encountered at work? By adapting
their own values to those dictated by their employer, or by making a stand, protesting,
or even whistleblowing? I became interested in these questions after giving some
philosophy lectures on the Nuremberg Trials and subsequent Nazi war crimes trials, at
which those at all levels of the Nazi hierarchy repudiated responsibility for atrocities.
The Nuremberg Trials not only involved issues about the allocation of responsibility and
blame but also raised the question how people who may have professed humane and
2 CHAPTER 1
decent standards in their private lives could have subordinated these to the immoral
requirements of the Nazi machine. I wanted to discover whether workers in far less
extreme circumstances encounter problems about the acceptance of responsibility and
whether they experience difficulties over subordinating their moral beliefs to those of
the organisation, or over compromising their beliefs in difficult predicaments at work.
It seemed probable that these questions would best be answered by empirical
research, by finding out how people think and act at work, rather than by prescriptive
philosophy, reflecting in a vacuum on how they ought to act. The Society for the
Furtherance of Critical Philosophy, which strongly advocates 'the ethics of everyday
practice', awarded me a Paul Branton Research Fellowship to undertake this research,
for which I am sincerely grateful. I interviewed 120 employees in eight organisations:
a water company, two local authorities, a large accountancy firm, a clearing bank, an
international airline, a government agency and a trades union. The resulting data are
attitudinal: such data raise methodological problems some of which are discussed later
in this introduction. The resulting study is in part a description of people's moral
attitudes and the actions they take when these are challenged in the workplace, and in
part a reflection on ethics at work and organisational morality. The book is intended to
be accessible to practitioners, especially human resources professionals, as well as to
those interested in applied philosophy and business ethics.
One initial hypothesis to be tested was that people will feel less than totally
responsible for the outcome of their actions when working in a hierarchical, line
management context. If so, they may disclaim personal responsibility for bad or harmful
outcomes. People in this position would also not experience moral dilemmas if they saw
themselves as essentially 'irresponsible', because following orders. This hypothesis was
not borne out: on the contrary, the participants in the study exhibited a strong sense of
personal responsibility and were willing to accept vicarious responsibility for the work
of their staff. There was, however, ambivalence about accepting responsibility when
they were contributing to a joint project or activity where the outcome was subject to
the vicissitudes of others' actions: this was noticeable in organisations where function
based teams or units had to cooperate. Another hypothesis was that people's dilemmas
will vary between different kinds of organisation, depending on whether such
organisations themselves uphold high ethical standards or are less ethically concerned
and perhaps depending on whether they are public-service orientated or commercially
orientated. Some organisation-specific differences appeared, but many dilemmas were
common to all the organisations, such as those posed by unfair management practices.
My research suggests that there was no slippage of moral standards or moral relativism
among the participants in this research and that the organisations themselves were
endeavouring to transact ethically most of the time. In this respect it is a 'good news'
book. This is not to say that we live in a perfect world: participants readily identified
shortcomings among their colleagues, such as laziness, dishonesty, unfairness, deceit,
fraud and politicking.
MORAL QUESTIONS 3
Chapter 2 introduces the participating organisations and considers their codes of
conduct, the attitudes of employees towards such codes and the importance of an
organisational ethos. Chapter 3 is an account of the moral beliefs of the participants in
the study and the moral dilemmas which some of them had encountered at work; it also
investigates what makes people want to whistleblow. In Chapter 4 I discuss some topical
ethical questions, such as whether the democratic governance of some public-sector
organisations generates moral problems, how equal opportunities policies are perceived
and whether privatisation threatens ethical standards. The nature of responsibility in
bureaucratically structured organisations is discussed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 focuses
on the participants' perceptions of the moral standing of their employing organisations -
an 'employees' ethical audit' in effect - and questions whether devices such as
empowerment and procedures enhance the ethical dimension of organisations.
Method
The validity and value of qualitative research is much debated among social scientists
and there is a large literature on the subject (Silverman, 1993 and 1997; Miles &
Huberman, 1994 are good examples). As a method it has pitfalls, some of which are
mentioned below. Nevertheless, a number of factors combine to make a qualitative
research method most suitable for exploring the issues of responsibility, moral beliefs
and moral conflicts. Qualitative research is, typically, concerned with individuals'
accounts of their attitudes, motivations and behaviour (see, e.g., Hakim, 1987),
although quantitative research can also be used to explore these and the JOU17/£ll of
Business Ethics, for example, often publishes quantitative studies of moral attitudes
among employees, managers and business students. Typically, qualitative research is
based on long interviews, which seemed the appropriate method for exploring the moral
dimensions of thought and behaviour. The interviews were structured. Respondents
received an outline of some of the questions to be raised, but were told that no
preparation was necessary. Anticipating that respondents might find it difficult to
identify or discuss moral matters if asked directly, I included a number of questions
which approached the same moral issues in different ways. This seemed successful: a
question which was a 'miss' for one interviewee was a 'hit' for another, eliciting a
detailed answer, and vice versa. One problem with attitudinal research is that it often
poses hypothetical questions which the interviewee answers from imagination rather than
experience. I tried to counter this tendency with several factual questions about their
actual conduct.
One shortcoming of the empirical metllOd is that it camlot be entirely 'naive'. One
camlot, simply, gather data and then formulate a theory to explain the facts. A theory,
or an embryonic hypothesis, must inform the data collection process. Thomas Kuhn
argued that all scientific research was informed by paradigms, such as the Newtonian
paradigm and, later, the Einsteinian paradigm (Kuhn, 1962) and others have applied his