HR Ethics

HR Ethics

Evaluate the contribution of the human resource management function as an ethics agent in organizations.

The issue at stake in recent decades is a new organizational role which is focused on providing strategies to effectively integrate a program aimed at fostering organizational ethics. This definition fits a new agent inside the organization: the Ethics Officer, who tries to provide leadership and strategies to assure that ethical norms of organizational and individual behavior are communicated and sustained throughout the whole organization. Nevertheless, right now this agent may still have a human resources profile, especially in European business, which is not rare. Ethics is about people's behavior, and this is a key concern of HR departments, so HRM has an active role to play in raising corporate ethical awareness and facilitating ethical behavior, especially if there are not enough financial resources in the company to fund a separate ethics position. In that respect, Winstanley et al. (1996) noticed that one role identified for HR is that of ethical stewardship, taking charge of raising awareness about ethical issues and promoting organizational ethics. Thus, HRM plays a highly important role in handling these topics, as HR policies and practices are highly important in transmitting the ethical values encouraged in the organization. Such an important role can be somehow noted in the frequently use of those mechanisms (e.g., performance appraisal, promotion policy, etc.) by practitioners in European business.

Assess ethical strategies, policies, and procedures used in the workplace.

The management of ethics in the workplace holds tremendous benefits for everyone, benefits both moral -- and even practical. This is particularly true today when it is critical to understand and manage highly diverse values in the workplace, and at a time when too many people still feel that business ethics is a topic for philosophy or is ...