The Three Levels of Ethical Concerns According to Kohlberg’s Model
1. The ethical issues in relation to sustainability and ethics can be explained by Kohlberg’s model of Cognitive Moral Development. As commented by Gibbs (2013), the three levels of the ethical concerns are pre-conventional morality, conventional morality and post-conventional morality. According to the pre-conventional morality, the child morality is controlled by external people such as adults and elders as the young adults lacks own morality. Pre-conventional morality enables the child to emphasise of the direct consequences. It is mainly categorised by obedience and punishment and self-interest orientation. Therefore, the child behaves obediently in order to avoid punishments. This is followed by self-benefit that allows the child to analyse their own benefit due to good behaviour. The conventional morality level deals with young adults. This is done by comparing the viewpoints and expectations of the society thereby, internalisation of the moral standards. This level consists of two stages enabling good interpersonal relationships. In this case, the child behaves properly to be viewed as a good individual followed by being aware of the wider rules of the society. In the post-conventional morality level, the individuals are judged on the basis of the individually chosen principles and morals. In this case, individuals realise that at times, they have to work against the will of specific individuals. Therefore, with time, individuals develop own set of morals that is against the law. Therefore, these are the three main ethical concerns according to the model.
2. Power or leadership is directly related in establishing an appropriate organisational culture. As mentioned by Hogan and Coote (2014), power helps in maintaining suitable control on the organisation thereby, uplifting the overall performance of the organisation. The leader of the organisation addresses, perceives, interacts and behaves appropriately with the employees within the organisation. Therefore, the leaders of the organisation play a significant role in improving the culture of the organisation. The leaders can help in establishing an effective communication within the entire organisation thereby, ensuring smooth flow of information. This can be helpful in preventing stress among the employees of the organisation in case of ethical dilemmas. The organisation is a place with diversified employees coming from different ethical, cultural and religious background. The leaders help in promoting a healthy and friendly working environment by treating each employee equally. This makes each employees valued thereby, creating a positive organisational culture. The leaders can also use their powers in order to provide guidance to the employees to cope up with the changes. Moreover, the leaders are considered to have visions thereby, always motivating the employees. This helps in building a friendly and competitive organisational culture providing scope of growth for each employee. Therefore, the unique characteristics and responsibilities of the leaders help in shaping corporate culture.
Leadership’s Role in Establishing Organisational Culture
3. Ethics play a very important role in an organizations and it is equally important for every organizations to organize a compliance and ethics programs. It aims at preventing wrongdoing, as the organization might have to pay an expensive price for wrong doings. Another reason is that wrongdoings need to be detected an early stage, failing which there might circumstances occur that the organization might have to suffer, sometimes an unethical actions calls for legal issues that that are so severe that the good will of the organization is at stake (Weber and Wasielski 2013). Ethics and compliance programs build a positive culture in the organization that lets the employees to live in harmony. It reduces the risks of the corporate for being held responsible for the individual wrongdoers, many a times it happens that the wrongdoings of individual employee jeopardizes the reputation of entire organization. It helps in reducing the damages that might occur in legal battles. The government speculation is less strict towards a particular organization’s ethical performance is better. An organization has reputation to maintain if it is planning to survive in the long run. It needs to built a trust in the society and create a goodwill so it is very important for an organization to conduct Ethics and Compliance programs.
4. The firms they fail often in developing and implementing a good ethics program. Most common five mistakes are discussed here, the firms fails to understand the purpose of the ethics programs, they do not understand and appreciate the cause behind these programs, for them it is just a formality, no organization can ever successfully design and implement an Ethic program unless it does not understand its relevance in corporate world. The second mistake is that they do not set realistic objectives that can be measured, making vague objectives will never make an ethic program successful. Another mistake, third mistake is that the senior managers do not take the ownership of ethic programs. The fourth mistake is that organization they do not identify and address the needs of average employees, unless un till the needs of average employees are addressed the organization will always fail in making a flawless ethics program. The fifth mistake they make is that they design a ethic program that is just serious lectures on ethical considerations, that is never enough the companies need to do more than just serious lectures they need to elaborate the concept of ethical considerations and its relevance and the consequences ( Kaptein 2015).
5. MCQs and True/False
a. A firm is said to have good corporate social performance when, stockholders invest in socially responsible causes.
b. Unethical behaviour is often triggered by pressure from higher management to achieve goals and an organization atmosphere that condones such behaviour.
c. Building a sustainable environment includes developing green supply chain and omitting hazardous emissions.
d. Fairness employment practices centres on obeying equal employment opportunities legislation
e. Team leader Gary is scheduled to prepare performance plan to Larry, a team member who also happens to be a his wife’s closest friend. The ethical temptation Gary faces is misuse of corporate resources.
f. A whistle blower is an employee who exposes organization’s wrong doings.
g. Top management acting as models of the right behavior is the best approach for creating an ethical and socially responsible workplace is likely to be most powerful.
h. John is a human resource manager for a government agency. He faces conflict of interest when his girlfriend’s mother applies to the agency and he must provide input on whether the woman should be hired.
False
i. Whether to use corporate assets is an ethical dilemma that falls into gray areas for many employees.
True.
j. The stakeholder view point is the traditional is the traditional perspective on social responsibility that business organization is only responsible only to its owners and stock holders.
True
References
Gibbs, J.C., 2013. Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt. Oxford University Press.
Hogan, S.J. and Coote, L.V., 2014. Organizational culture, innovation, and performance: A test of Schein’s model. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), pp.1609-1621.
Kaptein, M., 2015. The effectiveness of ethics programs: The role of scope, composition, and sequence. Journal of business ethics, 132(2), pp.415-431.
Weber, J. and Wasieleski, D.M., 2013. Corporate ethics and compliance programs: A report, analysis and critique. Journal of Business Ethics, 112(4), pp.609-626.
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