Discussing Ethics

Changing the culture of an organization can seemingly be a daunting task. Company culture relies on the ethics and values of the employees. Failure to properly uphold and communicate ethics to a workplace can lead to a laundry list of workplace misconduct. These include, but are not limited to:

• Violation of company rules by employees.

• Colleagues sabotaging each other.

• Theft of property by employees.

• The exaggeration of performance to shareholders by C suite executives (Gino, 2011).

The following infographic highlights 3 best (and subtle) practices to use for effectively communicating ethics in a changing organizational culture. I want to highlight three key and meaningful quotes for me from Gino's (2011) article about the best ways to discuss ethics. I elaborate on them further in the infographic.

1. "...social norms exert a strong influence that can override other factors in determining how people behave after observing dishonesty."

2. "...this subtle difference in the framing of business objectives versus ethics affects employee behavior."

3. "...people judge the unethical behavior of others more harshly when it resulted in a negative rather than a positive outcome, even when the actions that led to a good outcome were more egregious from an ethical standpoint than those that led to a negative outcome."