Published by Kogan Page, London, June 1997
© Copyright, David J Murray, 1997
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Summary of Part 2 - Integrity in Action
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If you have read through Part 1 , and have worked through the various exercises and points for challenge and reflection, you will by now have assembled a considerable list of ethical issues relevant to your organisation. We will now look further at what can be done about them. How can an organisation systematically approach the development of higher standards of behaviour, and achieve a greater degree of ethical consistency in its operations? What have other organisations around the world been doing in recent years?
The style of this section is somewhat different from the previous one. The main text of the chapters in Part 1 was largely descriptive. Challenges to investigation and diagnosis were contained in boxes to the side. In Part 2 the main text itself becomes challenging as you, the reader, are asked to consider what you, in your organisation, are going to do about ethical development, By the time we reach Part 3 the style will change yet again, as my own views are exposed more explicitly - about the way forward for various types of organisation, and what they should be doing to help the rest of us.
Codes
We start with a look at how Ethical Codes, or Codes of Conduct, or Codes of Practice, or Corporate Philosophies, or Statements of Corporate Business Principles (they come under many names) are being developed and used, and how you might introduce one yourself.
A code, however, can never cover all eventualities. As has already been explored in Chapter 4, a code which looks like a rule-book and fails to communicate the basic values or business principles of the organisation will fail to meet the need of the people. It may in some circumstances provide a legal defence, in that you might be able to claim that you've tried to prevent malpractice. I am not denying the importance of that, but in all probability a rule book without values will eventually come to be seen by your people as little better than a corporate straight-j acket. It is important for people to understand the values on which the rules are based, so that when situations arise which are not covered by the document explicitly they can work out a viable course of action from principles. In this chapter we also look at some externally developed codes to which companies can choose to subscribe.
Dilemmas
Many dilemmas arise in organisational life. There may be several alternative courses of action; each has certain plus points; each has other points against; none seems to be ethically perfect; how is the choice to be made? Chapter 10 deals with this difficult area. There is, of course, no simple mechanism for choice. If there were, the term dilemma would lose its meaning. Many choices are always going to be hard to make, hard to communicate, and hard to sustain. Whilst avoiding naive over-simplicity we will look at some approaches to dilemma which can at best be described as, ''Helps,'' but which I believe will move many of us a step or two forward. The decision process suggested, even if it doesn't make hard choices easy, will certainly help in explaining the choice to those affected. In the public sector, where transparency of decision making is increasingly an issue, the ability to communicate the reasoning behind complex choices can be critical to gaining public acceptance of a way forward.
Ethics Programmes
It is fine for a small number of people in an organisation to study the problems of ethical behaviour, but what about the dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of others? What about the managers who have never even thought of their business decisions as being ethical in nature? What about the people who are so busy that they look for simpler ways of working rather than adding yet more layers of complexity into their already overburdened hours? What about the people who, whilst sympathising with the idea of improving standards, or of doing something to reduce the risk of serious malpractice, will nevertheless be cautious about the sustainability of any initiative? They've seen so many short-term fashionable initiatives (quality, safety, continuous improvement, environment, customer service, TQM, etc., etc., ...) over recent years, and can only believe that this one will go the way of the others ... into forgetfulness and obscurity. How should your ethics programme be organised? This is the subject of Chapter 11 .
Integrated Ethical Management
"Initiative fatigue" is a serious disease and is now almost endemic in very many organisations. With this in mind the discussion of ethics programmes is followed immediately by Chapter 12 in which we think about a possible answer to the fatigue problem. "Integrated Ethical Management" suggests an approach to viewing the various initiatives as a whole. Too often topics like quality, customer care, health & safety, and environmental responsibility are seen as isolated one from another. In fact they can be viewed as different specialist expressions of a single set of integrating values. As well as being economically important they are all, in their different ways, expressions of moral concern. We examine both the principles involved and also practical approaches in use.
Governance and Performance
What benefit does all this effort deliver? What difference is it making? How well do we comply with the requirements of external bodies, such as government regulatory agencies? How well do we perform against the criteria and improvement targets we have set ourselves? Where are the further areas for improvement? In chapter 13, having first looked at some issues surrounding formal disciplinary action and the often thorny matter of individual performance appraisal, we take a short look at some recent developments in top level corporate governance and the increasingly popular process of ethical audit.
INTO ACTION
The purpose of this section is to be highly practical. It will not give all the answers, nor will it provide an easy-to-follow manual of how to do it, suitable for every occasion and situation. There can be no such thing! When dealing with such matters one is treading on delicate ground, an emotional minefield within the organisation. If these chapters provide some people with a basic guide to mapping out a way forward it will have served a valuable purpose. If it helps them appreciate how many more questions there are to be asked than they initially expected, and that it will be uncommonly difficult and time-consuming to achieve improvement, then it will have done even better.
From "Ethics in Organisations" by David Murray (to be published April 1997 by Kogan Page, London)
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