According to (Merriam Webster, 2010) ethics is the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation. When faced with a dilemma in a professional environment, we are often searching for the right way for it to be solved. The conflict with this issue is determining if our method or “right way” is aligned with the “right way” of the organization.
In recent years there has been an insurgence of people from multi-cultured backgrounds appearing within all types of organizations. They not only bring varied experience levels, which add opportunities for growth and development to a workplace, they also bring their individual cultural views. An individual’s culture, religion, gender, or personal beliefs may greatly influence the development of his or her unique viewpoint on values and ethics. They can affect one’s work ethic, communication style and how they make decisions. Employers should be concerned with all of these factors as they will directly affect the organization’s success.
Another reason for the increased need of organizational ethical standards is the company size. According to Ferrell and Fraedrich (2009), The Ethics Resource Center conducted the National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) of about three thousand U.S. employees to gather reliable data on key ethics and compliance outcomes and to help identify and better understand the ethics issues that are important to employees. The NBES found that observed misconduct is higher in large organizations – those with more than five hundred employees – than in smaller ones and that there are also differences in observed misconduct across employee levels (p. 207).
In essence, this reason is based on the numbers game. The larger the group, the more problems an organization will face. It can also be assumed that the larger the group, the better the opportunity for sub cultures/alliances to