Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in cooperate ethical performance. Some reasons for this trend include the increasing lack of confidence regarding corporate activities, the growing emphasis on quality of life issues, a wave of recent cooperate scandals at prominent firms, globalization of organizations and the introduction of a strategic approach. In all of this, HR professionals and in some companies, ethics officers have and continue to play a vital role in ethics for human resource management. Research suggests that successful ethics management depends more on employees' perceptions of fairness, ethical leadership at all levels, and the alignment of multiple formal and informal cultural systems to support ethical conduct than it does on formal ethics programmes. HR professionals must play a key role in ethics management using HR systems to invoke fairness and ensure organizational harmony.
Definitions
Ethics as defined by the Webster Dictionary is a branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct with respect to the rightness or wrongness of certain action. A useful definition advanced by the writer is that ethics is a standard of right and wrong driven to an extent by what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, benefits to society, fairness or specific virtues.
The Role of the Ethics Officer
Typically an ethics officer is responsible for developing an organization's ethics policies, creating communication related to the organization's code, planning ethics training programmes, and overseeing the ethics reporting function. An effective ethics officer knows that it is also critical to operate as part of a team that brings together many different partners: finance, marketing, operations, and especially human resources. This trust is dominant in drawing on their knowledge and resource in order to infuse