Ethical Performance

(Dimitriadis, 2019)

Organization’s ethics are the way employees do their work.  This could be perceived as ethical or unethical. Letendre (2015) defines organizational ethics as: organizational practices and structures which includes the values such as fairness, honor, compassion etc. in their day to day operations. There is no single set of ethics guidance or standard that is perfect to every company.

Eg: smoking could be prohibited by only by few organizations.

Most of the organizations have a set of code of ethics which is a good indicator of organization’s understanding of ethical behaviours (Wood, 2000). Organization’s ethical values are the basic guidelines to differentiate what is right and what is wrong, and organization’s rules and regulations pave the way to achieve these ethical values (Yankelovich, 1981).

The most important factor for the success of the organization is employee’s performance which is related to employees’ perception of organization’s ethics (Pettijohn et al., 2008). During the initial recruitment, interviewee is evaluated to identify the personal characteristics. According Hoy and Miskel (1996), employee performance is affected by individual characteristics and ethics. Employee’s performance can be measured by the amount of sales and production rate, managers rating of an employee and self-appraisal (Porter and Lawler, 1968)

It is important for employees to achieve targets or exceed the KPI or performance level. Therefore, employees may sometimes seek illegal ways to achieve those. These illegal ways are accepted neither by organization nor society (Imam et al., 2013). Organizations formulate code of conduct or employee handbook to instruct their employees how they should behave, work, communicate, dress, act, respond etc. which are in line with organization’s culture and acceptable to most of the employees.

As stated by Salahudin et al. (2016), there is a significant relationship between organizational ethics and Job performance. Individual employee will perform high when organizational ethics are implemented. Overall, it will be resulted in greater performance of the organization. It is a must to include code of ethics for employees as guidance, and management should encourage everyone in the organization to practice it to improve the performance. Finally, it should be noted that, in addition to compensation and reward system, organizational ethics play an important role in employee performance.

References;

Dimitriadis, C. (2019) Digital ethics rising in importance. Available at: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3396037/digital-ethics-rising-in-importance.html (Accessed: 10 January 2020).

Hoy, K., Miskel, C. (1996) Educational administration: Theory, research, and practice. 5^th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Imam, A., Sattar, A. and Muneer, S. (2013) ‘The impact of Islamic work ethics on employee performance: testing two models of personality x and personality y’, Science International (Lahore), 25(3), pp. 611-617.

Letendre, M. (2015) ‘Organizational Ethics’, Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, pp. 1-10.

Pettijohn, C., Pettijohn, L., & Taylor, J. (2008) ‘Salesperson perceptions of ethical behaviors: Their influence on job satisfaction and turnover intentions’, Journal of Business Ethics, 78(4), pp. 547–557.

Porter, W. and Lawler, E. (1968) Managerial attitudes and performance. Homewood, Ill: Irwin.

Salahudin, S., Alwi, M., Baharuddin, S. and Halimata, S. (2016) ‘The Relationship between Work Ethics and Job Performance’, International Conference on Business and Economics, pp. 465-471.

Wood, G. (2000) ‘A cross cultural comparison of the content of codes of ethics: USA, Canada and Australia’, Journal of Business Ethics, 25, pp. 287-298.

Yankelovich, D. and Immerwahr, J. (1984) 'Putting the work ethic to work Society’, 21(2), pp. 58-76.