Whether it is managing conflicts of interest, identifying and responding to vulnerable customers, upholding interpersonal and team behaviour, providing supportive leadership, or maintaining a safe working environment, the ethical dimensions to these everyday matters are often complex and grey. Too often the solution is to focus on a compliance approach.
Educating employees on what they should and should not do or relying on code-of conduct or grievance and whistle-blower provisions, does not take this complexity seriously. These current best-practice approaches fail to provide employees with the tools they need to reason their way through grey-area ethical problems and fall short of changing behaviour. Poor decision-making emerges when there is a failure to provide leaders and their teams with the insights, strategies, and support they need to navigate complex ethical challenges.
If organizations are to respond meaningfully to the everyday ethical dilemmas they are faced with, they need to move beyond compliance and empower their employees to become moral agents through a culture-based and leadership-based approach to building integrity and ethics at work.
Moving forward, a failure to engage meaningfully with building integrity and ethics at work will result in lost opportunities to attract socially conscious consumers and employees and will have a clear impact on the bottom line.
As a field of research and practice, Behavioural Ethics provides critical insights into understanding how and why people are at risk of making poor ethical decisions, overlooking the ethical dimensions to problems, or acting in ways that do not align with their own or the organisations ethical standards. Behavioural ethics reveals ‘blindspots’ (arising from workplace environmental factors) that impact on decision-making and judgement in ways that are often outside of conscious awareness, and in doing so provides an early intervention and prevention framework for identifying and targeting risk factors that exist within organisational processes and systems. This, in turn, empowers organisations to build workplace environments defined by high levels of integrity and employee mental health.