Ethical workers can make poor decisions when they are arrogant or over-confident; they do not understand the involvedness of the issues, and when business governance structures are fragile or absent. Whereas it is imperative to be confident in corporation, one should not let overconfidence bring about unreasonable rationalizations or ignorance of intricate issues. Since weak or absent governance structures can bring about poor decision-making, it is important to make sure there are appropriate business controls and supervision at-all-times. Lack of corporate controls and supervision causes dubious corporation transactions causing the ultimate collapse of the company.
Resisting Requests to Act Unethically is vital in all businesses; the first step one should take is to identify if a request is unethical. One is supposed to read the corporation’s instruction manual and ethical guiding principle to ensure he/she understands tolerable and intolerable behaviors. When one is not certain if a request is ethical, he/she should buy time so that he/she can carry out some investigations to learn. Human-resource experts and the corporation’s legal unit are great resources for these kinds of deliberations. After that, if the request turns-out-to-be illegitimate or unethical, one should think about seeking assistance from the corporation’s human resource or officially authorized experts to determine the best strategy to embark on.
One of the most significant ways of leading ethically is to act in an ethical manner. Working for a manager who behaves unethically provokes little or no respect from his/her immediate subordinates. Additionally, workers may be influenced to rationalize their own unethical conducts when they notice their managers and bosses are behaving unethically (Icheku; 2011). Another way of leading ethically is to communicate the core principles, code-of-ethics, and the guiding-principles of the corporation. An effectual code of ethics that is implemented in a company provides workers with a device for resisting demands to execute disreputable, illegitimate and unethical actions. Another way of leading ethically is to strengthen ethical conducts and chastise unethical behaviors with suitable consequences.
Making poor decisions can bring-about serious consequences and unethical decisions can negatively impact workers, businesses and shareholders. These negative impacts can be noticed in the workers’ resignations and even in the downfall of the company; one of the most difficult things to do is to restore trust once it has crumbled. By identifying the common characteristics of poor decision making, coming up with ways of resisting requests to behave unethically and comprehending ways to lead ethically, bosses can lessen the likelihood of unethical conducts and serve as optimistic role models for other workers.
In my experience, I have learnt that excellent decision makers expect outstanding outcomes and they’re normally not let down. When they are, it’s generally because of some unsystematic and unexpected reasons and not because they did not do an excellent job concerning solving the problem. However, there are exemptions to this syllogism (Ferrell; 2012). Making excellent ethical decisions entails having a skilled understanding concerning ethical problems and a skillful technique for discovering the ethical elements of a decision and evaluating the considerations that must impact people’s course-of-action.
Having a strategy for making an ethical decision is extremely important. When adopted recurrently, the technique becomes so common that employees work through it routinely without referring to the precise steps. The more people are faced with challenges on how to make good ethical choices, the more they are obliged to depend on dialogue and discussion from others regarding the problem. Only through cautious study of the problem, facilitated by the insights and diverse viewpoints of others, can we come up with appropriate ethical choices in such situations.
References
Ferrell, O. (2012).Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making & Cases, New York, NY: Cengage Learning.
Icheku, V. (2011).Understanding Ethics and Ethical Decision-Making, New York, NY: Xlibris Corporation.