Corporate Culture and Emotional Decision-Making Essay

Corporate culture and ethics

Corporate culture in an organization

In my organization, the corporate culture is centered around self-sacrifice and caring about the concerns of other members. The organization demonstrates this during times of crisis. In one instance, the firm needed to lay off workers; it decided not to do so by selecting a less dramatic course of action, and this was by instating pay cuts. As a result, workers realized that the organization cares for their well-being. This corporate culture could be improved by changing the reward system to reflect its values. People should be rewarded for demonstrating values of loyalty and self-sacrifice towards the company.

Ethics survey for the everyday working environment

After reading the ethics survey, I realized that morality is a very complex issue. One must consider the importance of legality over ethics. Furthermore, one must choose between one’s personal goals and the overall goals of the organization or co-workers’ goals. In the working environment, one can use questions in the questionnaire to choose between conflicting orders from above. If one has to choose people for hiring, questions concerning the worthiness of the candidates need to arise when making those decisions. Other questions include: ‘Would you sacrifice your job to uphold your ethical standards?’ and ‘What if your most valuable client asked you to bend the rules?’

Employee Management

Hiring policy and employees’ perception

The policy at my workplace is to promote from within as much as possible but look towards the outside environment if in-house talent does not exist. Management sometimes breaks this policy by starting from the outside, and employees often feel shortchanged. Both options are right because internal promotions ensure that the abilities and relationships of the employees are maintained. External hires are important during periods of expansion or explosive growth. The right choice should be the one that solves prevailing problems in the firm, although management should start from within.

Employee involvement in the planning process

Employees can be involved in the planning process to the benefit of the company when they share their ideas about particular innovation, and that innovation turns out to be a great source of competitive advantage (Sagie & Aycan, 2003). Employees will feel very valuable in the organization, and the firm will value their input even more. Their skills will have been sharpened, and the level of organizational citizenship behavior will have improved tremendously after such a successful endeavor.

Employee uninvolvement in the planning process

Failure of organizations to include employees in a planning process can lead to the organizational detriment. For instance, when a company decides to enact a new work policy on training without employee involvement, most workers will be obligated to take part in the training without really thinking about how they can translate it to their jobs. The company will spend its resources on a function that has minimal returns, and employees will feel frustrated about having less time to do the ‘real’ work.

Emotions in Decision-Making

An example of overwhelming stress from the management

Management was under great pressure from shareholders to increase productivity or face expulsion. Most managers started pushing employees to work longer hours for the same pay. None of them told employees what was going on, so this created a lot of tension. In this regard, the emotion of fear had taken over, and management wanted to avoid the consequences of that emotion by adopting a more proactive stance on the matter. If I was in management, I would have informed employees about the new requirements.

A situation when emotions played a major role in the decision-making

There was a time in my organization when I was getting more work than I could handle. Remarks about promotions were also going around. Other workers were getting a fair workload, but mine had been increased tremendously. It was almost as if I was the only person who could handle that kind of work. I was overwhelmed by these new responsibilities but was carried away by the possibility of getting a promotion.

My emotions of excitement about future opportunities prevented me from discussing the excessive workload with my supervisor. I should have managed these emotions because they put me through great discomfort, and I was under immense pressure to perform. I was taking a shortcut in my decision-making process (Isen & Patrick, 1983). It would have been better for me to weigh all the risks and rewards of talking to my supervisor before making my choice.

References

Isen, A. & Patrick, R. (1983). The effect of positive feelings on risk taking: when the chips are down. Organizational behavior and human performance, 31(2), 194-202.

Sagie, A. & Aycan, Z. (2003). A cross cultural analysis of participative decision making in organizations. Human relations, 56, 453-473.