Ethical dilemma refers to a situation where one has to decide between acting ethical, remaining a faithful servant organizational member or falling to the trap of violating the professional code of ethics for what is wrong or unethical (Lindy& Schaefer, 2010). Workers across all professions are guided by codes of ethics, which are the principles of morality that govern the behavior of the employees. Additionally, every organization has its guidelines which employees ought to follow during their execution of duty. Moreover, there are legal guidelines and those from professional bodies that also guide employees to remain professional and act in the best interest of the profession and the organizations they work for. Notably, a couple of the regulations from the law, professional ethics, and organizational guidelines tend to look similar, making them own the universal feature, suggesting that they apply everywhere.
In workplaces today, ethical dilemmas exist almost daily. As the saying goes, ‘human is to err,’ individuals and organizations device means to overcome such ethical issues before they arise. In my encounter with ethical dilemmas at the place of work, solving them prove to be somehow tricky. Nevertheless, after numerous procedures and steps, and work continues in an even better way.
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My experience
Conducting personal businesses using the company time and the company resources was a culture that had been harbored in the company I work for long before I joined the company. When I joined the company, many people had the habit of stealing company time more often than a note to attend to personal businesses. This continued for a long time due to the weak control system in our company, which was not strict enough to let the employees stay at work. I watched the habit and soon joined in the practice. I could often make a couple of calls on the company phone. I made it a habit to call my family and sometimes make a doctor’s appointment with the company call.
I was very much informed that it was unethical to conduct personal businesses with company resources, yet I got inspired by the culture I found going on at the company. Moreover, some of my calls could be urgent emergency calls, such as the doctor’s appointment. All in all, it was still unethical because I never sought the manager’s permission to conduct all this. I knew I was doing something wrong, but I wondered how I would bring it to the manager’s attention.
Solution
My first step in solving the ethical dilemma was identifying it as a moral issue. There was so much friction between my professional responsibilities and personal businesses. A lot of people at the company, too, were not attending to their professional duties, and there was a need to bring a solution onboard. Having it as a culture within the organization was even worse to the business because new employees could join suit just a few months after working at the company. It is important to identify an ethical issue before acting upon it (Yoder & Denhardt, 2019).
Another critical step that I made was identifying the central values and principles that were at stake and shared with a couple of my colleagues. Solving ethical issues depends much on knowledge on moral values at stake and the ability to rank those values in order of priority (Dane & Sonenshein 2015). My other step was reporting the issue to the manager and asked him to set up an action plan and share it with all of us. In his action plan, training the employees on ethics featured among the first actions implemented. Training on ethics is equally important in helping employees through ethical issues (Romious, Thompson & Thompson, 2016). After the training and a couple of more stringent rules, everything stopped.
References
Dane, E., & Sonenshein, S. (2015). On the role of experience in ethical decision making at work: An ethical expertise perspective. Organizational Psychology Review , 5 (1), 74-96.
Lindy, C., & Schaefer, F. (2010). Negative workplace behaviours: an ethical dilemma for nurse managers. Journal of Nursing Management , 18 (3), 285-292.
Romious, T. S., Thompson, R., & Thompson, E. (2016). Ethics Training and Workplace Ethical Decisions of MBA Professionals. Journal of Education and Learning , 5 (1), 190-198.
Yoder, D. E., & Denhardt, K. G. (2019). Ethics education in public administration and affairs: Preparing graduates for workplace moral dilemmas. In Handbook of administrative ethics (pp. 85-104). Routledge.
