Should Organization Be Held Ethically Responsible For Employee Stress?

April 6, 2010

HR Assignment #3 ethical’s/org. change

In today’s global economy, competition is ferocious and only the strongest organizations survive, while the weak perish. HR serves a valuable function in this Darwinian “survival of the fittest” cooperate world by providing valuable information on an organization’s internal competencies. Managers then create a coherent corporate strategy that devises ways for the corporation to compete within its chosen domain, based in part on the information gathered by HR. Often corporate strategies change for example; sometimes organizations decide that strategically, a merger or an acquisition is the best course of action. A Corporation could also pursue a strategic alliance or joint venture resulting often in outsourcing or offshoring work to other locations. Other times a company can simply decide to trim its workforce to reduce costs when times are bad or perhaps to make more money when times are good. An organization can commit numeral changes that can cause individual employees to go through stress over their job security, inevitably raising the question to whether or not organizations are ethically responsible in protecting employees from such stress. The answer is simply no; organizations should not ethically responsibly to protect employees from the stress of organizational change because it is not relevant or practical for an organization to do so.

Protecting employees from the stress of organizational change is not relevant to the organization. Organizations must change and adapt to be able to survive; the ones that are capable of changing quickly are the organizations that are going to prosper. Ensuring employees that their jobs are safe is not the purgative of an organiz...

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Organizations should not be held ethically responsible for the stress on employees caused by organizational change because it is not relevant to the organizations primary objective is not practical to implement and there is no viable, more ethically sound alternative. It is true that increasingly the world demands more socially responsible organizations but many of the “ethically correct” things an organization is expected to do come from organizational theories such as human resource management theory, which remains an academic idea and not one that is implemented in the real world often. As such, organizations like to appear ethically/socially responsible but many fundamentally are not because they either choose not to get ahead i.e. wall mart or cannot live up to such high standards based on human desires and not reality of the situation at hand.