Ethics
Imagine that it's your responsibility to select an ethics officer for your organization. What qualities, background, and experience would you look for? Why? Would you ever be interested in such a position? Why or why not?
An ethics officer plays a significant role for an organization. In the selection of the right ethics officer for my organization, I would have to consider several major factors such as the personal qualities, background and experience. First of all, the ethics officer should posses the following qualities: honesty, truthfulness, integrity, fairness, accuracy, and significance of moral values. These qualities are the basic ingredients that should be searched thoroughly in the ethics officer during the selection process.
The background of the ethics officer should be related to any field such as business, medicine, engineering, sociology, psychology or armed forces, but it should be kept in mind that the ethics officer belongs to a specialized field with sound educational background. The ethics officer with a law degree would be preferable because the rule of law is the key to achieve justice and ethics in any place. The age criteria should be based upon the experience level. Employees prefer older and mature people when they have ethical issues and feel more comfortable with an older person as an ethics officer. It is human tendency to rely upon the seniors for resolving their ethical issues. The ethics officer should have a minimum of seven years experience in an organization where he/she had to deal with ethical issues and ensure that business ethics are being followed. he/she should have a keener sense to observe things and people so that ethics are followed strictly in an organization.
Several alarming ethical issues can erupt which need to be resolved by the ethics officer such as the employment practices or organizational (internal) cultures which are at times unfair and biased. In the global markets, it is important to have fair employment practices with no discrimination of gender, race, color or nationality. The ethics officer could be either within the organization or from outside the organization. In any case, it is highly important to create credibility and reliability of employees in the organization. There are factors that could bar an insider from the job of ethics which are mistrust, weak organizational culture, corruption, weak governance, and one-way (top-down) communication channels in an organization.
2. Should the Ethics Officer report to the company's chief executive officer, the legal department, human resources office or the audit department? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
The ethics officer should report to the legal department as it is the most important department related with the laws and rules of an organization. It is important to understand that ethics is not concerned with one department only; it is the core of the whole organization and needs to be integrated within all the departments of the organization. Most importantly, the top level management needs to be informed about the ethical conflicts arising in the organization as their job is to give senior advice and strategic vision to the organization. The approach of the ethics officer should be based on conflict resolution through prevention and immediate action. Therefore, the legal department which has the mission to make the organization abide by the state laws, business laws and the organization's own internal policies and ethics. The ethics officer needs to report to the legal department on regular basis to achieve congruence and harmony. The legal department could help the ethics officer to remain up-to-date with new business laws and international laws. Thirdly, the human resource department has the mission to manage the human resource to achieve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. However, this could only be achieved through an ethical and positive organizational culture which the human resource department manages. The risk associated here is that the organization needs to ensure that ethical practices are being adopted to achieve organizational success without harming the interests of the stakeholders.
Human resource department could help the ethics officer in building positive relationships with all the stake holders and maintain an ethical environment though ethical practices. Lastly, the audit department has the mission to deal with the financial statements of the organization to ensure that they are correct without misleading information and are up-to-date. Therefore, here business ethics again play a significant role. The risk associated with raising an issue in this department is that it can affect the organization's image in the financial markets. The audit department could help the ethics officer in keeping a check on all...
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