The Ethical By-stander
Jennings said the following:
“I have learned through my work that employees often
take offense at ethics training and slip into
silence-and-fear mode because they believe that it is the
leadership in their companies that is unethical, not them.
Statistics from the Society for Human Resource Management
bear this out. In 1999, 99 percent of employees believed
that their ethical standards were higher then those of the
folks they worked with. Everyone believes that he or she is
the most ethical person in the room. That attitude makes
employees resent training, see only the mote in others’
eyes, and fail to engage in the serious introspection of
questioning their behavior and what their organizations are
doing”
(Read more about Marianne Jennings' work in our research
section).
Note: I have seen this over and over and over. My question
is, if you are so ethical and you see these people around
you dong unethical things, why don’t you do/say something
about it?
