Ethikos Weekly Editor’s Picks – October 8, 2014

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Editor’s Top Choice:

When Corporate Cultures Clash: Defining Company Values Across Borders

By Bruce Kennedy of The Guardian:

From ethics to etiquette, fashions to values, cultural norms vary vastly from place to place—and companies that ignore the differences do so at their own peril. But what if a company is caught between two communities—and two sets of community values? For companies that manufacture products in one country and sell them in another, balancing the ethics and moral values of two cultures can be a delicate dance of give and take, with lessons for both sides.

There’s a very real impetus for companies to make corporate social responsibility (CSR) work: developed-world customers often respond harshly to companies that they perceive as coming up short on social responsibility. As a UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs report noted, a large amount of CSR has been “driven by the concerns of investors, companies, campaign groups and consumers in the world’s richest countries”. In other words, as developed-world consumers and communities have called for greater corporate responsibility from their preferred brands, companies have responded with actions that, the report notes, have become important for reducing poverty in middle- and low-income nations. Read more


Other Featured Picks of the Week

Are You Engaged at Work? The Importance of Friendship and Employee Resource Groups

Kevin Kruse, Contributor to Forbes:

How important is it to have friends at work?

As adults, in any given week we spend much more time around people at work than we do outside of the organization. As social creatures, it is inevitable that we form personal relationships and friendships with those around us.

In fact, one of the questions from Gallup’s famous Q12 survey is, “I have a best friend at work.” By their own admission this is one of the more controversial questions on the survey. In my own companies I know we struggled with how to interpret this question. Are they asking if my best friend in the world just so happens to work with me? Do they mean there is someone at work I like better than others?

Despite the confusion around the question, the data is clear that friendship is more important than pay or benefits, and strongly correlates to productivity, safety, customer loyalty and profitability (source: The Collective Advantage, Gallup). Read more


Turning Employees Into Ethics Believers

From Ben DiPietro of The Wall Street Journal:

A strong ethical culture at a company is widely seen as a bulwark against compliance failures, because it makes employees more prone to question what they see as unethical behavior.

At the same time, it’s hard to go about establishing such a culture. Enron Corp. famously had a high-sounding code of ethics that failed to deter its executives from an accounting fraud that brought down the company. Read more


Do Unethical Leaders Foster Conflict Among Followers?

Nick Redding, writing for Mediate.com:

Recent events, such as the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill, questionable accounting practices at Enron, and illegal hiring practices among Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies, are just a few among many examples of unethical organization leadership practices today. While the impact of unethical leadership practices on local communities is often times immeasurable, what is less well understood is the impact of this type of leadership inside the organization. Specifically, how does unethical leadership impact those individuals working under it?

A recent study, presented at the 2014 International Association of Conflict Management (IACM) in the Netherlands, addresses this question. Mayowa Babalola, a doctoral student at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and colleagues surveyed 165 supervisor-employee pairs measuring employee ratings of their supervisors’ ethical leadership behaviors, employees’ confidence in their ability to resolve disputes with other employees, and supervisors’ observations of conflicts between their subordinates. They found that, indeed, ethical leadership does impact employee relations. When supervisors were seen as less ethical, their employees felt less confident in their ability to resolve conflicts with peers. Further, employees lacking this confidence reported experiencing more conflicts with coworkers.Read more


You’re More Biased than You Think

From Jane Porter, of Fast Company:

Every day we make countless decisions without realizing it. Researchers call this “unconscious bias.” It’s happening right now as you read this.

You’re faced with around 11 million pieces of information at any given moment, according to Timothy Wilson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of the book Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. The brain can only process about 40 of those bits of information and so it creates shortcuts and uses past knowledge to make assumptions.

How and why our brains choose the way they do has been generating lots of conversation at Google, which recently announced a workshop focused on unconscious biases. Sure, studying the unconscious decisions we make can be critical when it comes to designing products or software people use, but more importantly, it’s critical when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace today. Read more


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