MANAGE & LEAD
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCE
An Employee’s Lapse in Ethical Behavior—No Matter How Small it May Seem—Can Have a Compounding,
Negative Effect on the Entire Workplace.
By Chrissey Breault
Think you are a person of integrity and bring the highest
standards of ethics to your workplace each day?
Despite hundreds of pages of policies, codes of ethics,
codes of conduct, organizational values, and carefully
defined work environments and company cultures, lapses
in workplace ethics occur every day.
Lapses in workplace ethics result from inappropriate office
behavior such as insider stock trading, expense account
fraud, sexual harassment, sexism, and involvement in
conflicts of interest.
Lapses in workplace ethics do not need to rise to such a
level that would impact the workplace environment you
provide for employees. Lapses in workplace ethics
can also occur because of simple issues
involving toilet paper, copy machines, and
lunch signup lists.
In a nationally important workplace
ethics case, Hewlett-Packard’s former
CEO, Mark Hurd, became entangled in
workplace ethics issues. Based on only
the company’s public statement, it appears
Hurd left because he violated the company’s
expected standards of conduct.
The appointed interim CEO, until the company found a
permanent replacement for Hurd, asked employees “to
remain ‘focused’ and said, ‘Mark had failed to disclose
a close personal relationship he had with the contractor
who constituted a conflict of interest, failed to maintain
accurate expense reports and misused company assets.’”
Unfortunately, Hurd is neither the first nor only high-profile
executive in recent years whose downfall was caused by
inappropriate personal conduct. Such lapses in ethics
occur in workplaces every day.
Violations may be spoken or unspoken, published or
unpublished, with or without a CEO title. Violations of the
rules don’t necessarily have to rise to the level of conflict of
interest or questionable expense accounting.
LAPSES IN ETHICS DRIVES POLICY DEVELOPMENT
Sometimes, untrustworthy actions by certain employees
lead to the implementation of strict company policies.
Consider, for example, the debate over the effectiveness
of a paid-time-off (PTO) policy versus one that divides
available days between personal, sick days, and vacation
time off.
The only reason strict PTO policies sometimes
exist is that a few employees may have taken
advantage of the employer’s attempts to
offer sympathetic time-off for legitimate
life reasons. To address the situation, the
employer then feels compelled to limit
management discretion and decision-making
about individual employee situations instead of
instituting policies to govern all.
You can build a similar case for most organizational
policies—some employees’ failure to practice principled
workplace ethical decision-making results in restrictive
policies that cover all employees.
Codes of conduct or business ethics exist to guide the
expected behavior of honorable employees. But, these
often also have been initiated in response to dishonorable
behavior.
In today’s workplace, potential charges of unfair treatment,
13