Personal Values, Organisational Ethics and Organisational Culture

Personal Values

Each individual employee brings to the organisation their own personal value system. This value system enables the individual to make decisions in every aspect of their lives, including their work life. Important for the organisation and the individual to realise though is that the overlap between personal values and organisational values will overlap in varying degrees.

Organisational Ethics

It is the principles, norms and standards that guide an organisation’s conduct of its activities, internal relations and interactions with external stakeholders. In other words, these are the organisation’s value system. If this organisational value system is very clear, it will be easier for employees to bring their personal values in line with organisational values, or at least adhere to organisational values while under the organisation’s jurisdiction.

Organisational Culture

Is a wide concept describing the complex network of relationships within a organisation established over years of its existence. Organisational culture could have a intense impact on ethics.

Picket’s (2001) research on the relationship between employee’s beliefs and their consequent behaviour gave birth to the Model of Ethical Leadership, discussed below. This model is very useful to explain the relationship between personal values, organisational ethics and organisational culture.

Ethical Environment: This encompasses ethical leadership, role modelling, ethical norms, reward systems that support ethical conduct and identifies the degree to which unethical behaviour is punished in organisations.

Ethical Climate: Nine ethical climates has been identified:

• Egoist-individual - self-interest is the expected norm
• Egoistic-local - the company’s interest guides the decisions that are made
• Egoist-cosmopolitan – efficiency is the expected norm
• Benevolent-individual – the welfare of individuals inside the organization guide decisions
• Benevolent-local – the welfare of groups inside the organization guide decisions
• Benevolent-cosmopolitan – the welfare of individuals and groups outside the organization guide decisions
• Principled-individual – personal morals guide decisions
• Principled-local – organizational rules and regulations are the norm
• Principled-cosmopolitan – external laws and codes guide ethical decisions

Moral Climate: Can be defined as the way in which employees perceptions of organisational norms forms their intentions, consideration of consequences, observation of contracts, implementation of procedures.

Inner processes of Moral Behaviour: Early theories on morality argue that moral behaviour is determined by behaviour, feelings and thoughts. The thoughts that usually goes through the mind when deciding on moral action could look as follows:

• How do my actions affect the welfare of others?
• Formulate moral course of action, including ideal situation
• Select best option from above
• Execute and implement

Corporate social responsibility: Reasons for organisations to become more socially responsible are many, but can be summarised in four categories: economical, legal, ethical and philanthropic. The ethical reason for corporate social responsibility is that society expects from businesses to fulfil their ethical responsibilities by avoiding questionable practices and to adhere to the spirit of the law, not only the letter of the law. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) developed a Social Responsibility Investment Index (SRI). Companies rated tops on this index of 94 points included Anglo American, Nedcor, Standard Bank, Firstrand, ABSA, Woolworths, MTN, Nampak, Illovo Sugar.

Interesting websites to visit to view South African examples of Social Responsible companies are:

www.virginactive.co.za

www.bridgestone.co.za

www.is.co.za

www.lexmark.co.za