Ethical Climate Essay

Organizations are constantly tested with various moral and ethical problems and dilemmas. Organizational leaders are the key to establishing an ethical climate in the workplace. By understanding and improving their own moral reasoning, and the biases that affect moral judgment, they enable themselves to make better decisions. This has a catalytic effect that positively increases organizational climate, ultimately improving all organizational behavior.
Having an ethical climate is important because it directly reflects the ethical behavior of organizational leaders. Consequently, it can be viewed as an extension of organizational culture, which ultimately dictates organizational behavior (Boundless, 2014). Therefore, if an organization

This manifests in a leaders tendency to overrate themselves and their work. People typically view themselves on a higher level than their peers, which can have them overlooking their own short comings. Also, people are more inclined to take credit for success and blame external factors for failures. Lastly, there are conflicts of interest. Hughes et al. (2014) cite that “we may be conscious of potential conflicts of interest, but even then, though, we misjudge our own ability to discount the extent to which the conflict actually biases our perception of the situation in our own favor” (p. 149). All of these are biases impact moral reasoning. When leaders allow these biases to impact their behavior and decision making, it results in an unhealthy organizational culture and unethical climate. Conversely, when leaders fully understand these biases and continually work towards improving their moral reasoning, they can positively affect organizational culture and create an ethical climate, which ultimately influencing all organizational

Trimming fat and reducing management layers is inevitable. However, boosting shareholder wealth by stepping on the stakeholders is immoral and unethical. While it is hard to say definitively what the right answer here was, we can examine some of Kidder’s principles of resolving ethical dilemmas to evaluate the decisions made. For example, ends-based thinking, which refers to doing what is best for the masses, was clearly not accounted for in this decision making process. Shareholders and senior management seemed to be the benefactors in CSC’s example. Furthermore, the care-based thinking principle also seems to have been neglected in this decision making process. I would find it difficult to imagine that senior leaders contemplated their proposed behaviors as if they were the object rather than the agent, and consulted their feelings before determining that 40% of the workforce must fall into the category of not meeting expectations (Hughes et al., 2014). Overall, CSC’s decisions were clearly not entirely moral or