Ethikos Weekly Editor’s Picks – September 9, 2014

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Editor’s Top Choice:

How Do You Deal With an Unethical, Productive Employee

By Russ Warner, writing for The Huffington Post:

Business can be difficult, but business is business. Sometimes you have to do hard things because it’s better for the organization. But deciding what is best for the organization can be a bit fuzzy at times.

Consider, for example, if you have a salesperson that is known for unethical behavior but has brought in more revenue than the rest of the team?
What about the operations manager in a field office who uses bribery to close deals and sign contracts?

What if the procurement officer funnels work to suppliers where there is self-interest but is highly efficient?

Do you terminate these people and lose profits and momentum, or do you try to help them change their behavior? Hiring productive people takes a lot of time and effort. Read more


Other Featured Picks of the Week

6 Ways to Tell if Your Workplace is Fair

Gwen Moran of Fast Company:

Being a fair boss may be exhausting, and may even leave you grumpy the next day, but the upside can be worth it.

Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D., the Ethics Guy and author of Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Untangling Your Toughest Problems at Work and Beyond, says that fair bosses have more engaged and loyal employees who spread the good word about their companies.

He points to a recent report on CBS Sunday Morning that found over the past 15 years, companies on Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list delivered nearly twice the annualized returns than those of the general market.

“It seems to be an inherent component to being human to recognize when we’re being treated fairly, and to complain when we’re not being treated fairly,” Weinstein says.

Does your workplace play fair? Here are some fundamental elements of fairness. Read more


Labor Law: Ethics in the Office

From Karen Michael writing for The Times-Dispatch

The trial and verdict against the McDonnells have brought the discussion around ethics in the workplace into the forefront. Most organizations implement robust Code of Conduct and have ethics policies and train their employees heavily on the organization’s expectations around ethics. Despite these efforts, organizations frequently uncover breaches of ethics and integrity.

One reason ethics efforts fail is because organizations have a difficult time measuring compliance. For example, a client implemented a performance review with the category of “ethics” as a rating for employees, and they could be rated “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations” or “unsatisfactory.” I asked the client, “What constitutes exceeds expectations in category of ethics?” He replied, “If the person demonstrates the highest form of ethical behavior,” but then he acknowledged he didn’t really know what that would look like. And that is the problem with measuring compliance with ethics – can it truly be measured? Read more


Wharton Study Finds Negotiators Lie More Often to Women than Men

Bookyung Jo writing for The Daily Pennsylvanian, “Future career women at Penn, the world of business might be more deceptive than you think.

Jessica Kennedy , a former legal studies and business ethics researcher at Wharton , found in a study with two researchers from UC Berkeley that people lie to women in negotiations more often than they lie to men.

The study — in a forthcoming issue of the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes — was based on simulated negotiations among students in MBA classes at another university, where all the students had an incentive to perform well and boost their reputations. The simulated negotiations were mostly distributor or real estate negotiations where ‘buyer’s gain was the seller’s loss,’ Kennedy said.

This competitive negotiation setting was designed to be similar to real-world situations in which it is costly for negotiators to lie if their partners discover the deception.

To Kennedy’s surprise, the negotiators lied 17 percent more when their counterparts were women.

‘There wasn’t any evidence that women are easier to deceive,’ Kennedy said. ‘People just have stereotypes about how easily misled women are.’

The quality of lies was also noticeably different. Agents tended to say lies that are based on true facts to men, whereas they gave blatant lies to women.

However, the study indicated that it was not just men who hold the stereotype.” Read more


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