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68 Chapter 3 ● Communication EthicsSometimes simple recognition of an ethical problem will point toward a solution. Let’s sayyour job is to review advertising copy for your company’s products. As you do so, you recognizea series of misleading claims in the proposed ad copy. Your solution is easy enough: Return thecopy to the writing team with specific instructions to remove or correct the misleading claims.More often, however, the solution to an ethical problem involves conflicting values.Let’s say you are a manager who discovers that the production line presents potentialhazards to the reproductive health of female workers. You also recognize that removingwomen from the line would be unfair. Two competing values in this instance—equal employmentopportunity and keeping workers from harm—require some careful ethical reasoning inorder to make an appropriate moral judgment.ETHICAL CONDUCT Recognizing ethical dilemmas and reasoning your way to an appropriatesolution are simply the first two steps in living an ethical life in business. It’s one thing toknow what you should do and quite another to do it. Lynn Sharp Paine of the HarvardBusiness School says, “Hypocrisy and cowardice, both reflected in discrepancies betweenprofessed beliefs and actual conduct, are the enemies of integrity.” 23Recognizing that it would be wrong to file an inflated travel voucher following a businesstrip, you remind your colleagues that the company will gladly reimburse all necessaryexpenses but only for the amounts actually spent. Although you encourage and expect othersto comply with that reasoning, you claim expenses in excess of what you actually spent andask for reimbursement for expenditures that were not legitimate business expenses. In such acase, hypocrisy would best describe your behavior.If you were witness to a fellow employee stealing supplies from your company butfailed to speak with either him or your supervisor, you might well be guilty of cowardice. Yourecognized the problem and knew what the appropriate response would be but failed to act.Such situations require a certain amount of moral courage—the ability to stand up and dowhat is right, even though it won’t be easy, profitable, or popular.ETHICAL LEADERSHIP The capacity for ethical leadership, according to Professor Paine,“is associated with the highest levels of integrity.” She quotes Confucius, saying “The superiorperson seeks to perfect the admirable qualities of others and does not seek to perfect their badqualities. The lesser person does the opposite of this.” She goes on to note that most businessstudents will work in organizations in which they will have the power and responsibility not onlyto exercise their own ethical capacities but to influence the exercise of those capacities in others. 24Numerous researchers and commentators attribute critical importance to the ethicalexample provided by an organization’s top officials. It seems unlikely that great integritywould emerge in an organization led by men and women lacking in basic integrity. Yet, withoutquestion, leadership is not confined to the chairman or chief executive officer of an organization.It extends directly to every organization’s executives and senior managers.Executive-search firm Russell Reynolds, along with personality-testing firm HoganAssessment Systems, recently conducted psychological profiles of more than 1,400 managersin large U.S. companies. Each manager was given 28 true-or-false questions on rule complianceand interactions with others to gauge their level of integrity. The somewhat troublingresult: One out of every eight responded in ways that may be seen as “high risk.” Accordingto Dean Stamoulis, an executive director at Russell Reynolds, the findings indicate that thosemanagers are far more likely to break the rules than the others. “These are folks who believethe rules do not apply to them,” he says. 25000200010270582216Management Communication: A Case-Analysis Approach, Fourth Edition, by James S. O'Rourke, IV. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Chapter 3 ● Communication Ethics 69Ethical leadership also extends from those managers to their frontline supervisors. Dayto day, these supervisors are responsible for setting examples and assisting those who workfor them. Others in an organization will watch what you do, and if you’re in a position ofleadership or responsibility, an ethical obligation accompanies your management duties. Ifyou let your employees know, directly or indirectly, that you condone industrial spying or thetheft of competitive marketing data, they will assume that the company approves and thatsuch acts are probably all right. The plain fact is, the moral education of those beneath youin an organization depends on your willingness to engage in and reward ethical behavior. 26APPLYING ETHICAL STANDARDS TO MANAGEMENTCOMMUNICATIONEthical business practice is a noble goal to which virtually all firms aspire. Many companies,however, fail to achieve this lofty ideal for a number of reasons. Increased levels of globalcompetition, financial pressures, lack of communication throughout organizations, and theabsence of moral leadership at the top levels are but a few of the most prevalent reasons. 27STATEMENTS OF ETHICAL PRINCIPLESPerhaps the most important means of establishing moral leadership in a business organization—and demonstrating that leadership to employees, customers, clients, competitors, and the worldat large—is through a formal statement of ethical principles. Developing and publishing acorporate statement of ethics certainly will not, by itself, make a company ethical, but it iscertainly a good first step. To the question of why a company should have such a statement,Professor Patrick E. Murphy offers this response:First, and most important, ethics statements denote the seriousness with which theorganization takes its ethical commitments. Words are empty without some documentation.The written statement then serves as a foundation from which ethicalbehavior can be built. Corporate culture is often viewed as being more importantthan policies in setting the ethical climate for any organization. However, writtenethical principles send a strong signal that ethics matters to the firm. 28Once an organization’s size, according to Murphy, goes beyond a handful of employeeswho interact regularly face to face, it becomes difficult to convey a sense of an organization’sprinciples and values. An ethics statement makes expectations more concrete. Furthermore,developing such a document forces those engaged in the process, whether they be the founderor current management, to articulate their beliefs in a cohesive fashion and then set themdown in writing for possible challenge by others. 29000200010270582216TYPES OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS Although ethics statements can be classified into severaltypes, three appear to predominate. They include values statements, corporate credos (or setsof basic beliefs), and corporate codes of ethics.The most prevalent form in which ethical principles are stated in U.S.-based corporations isa code of ethics. More than 90 percent of large organizations have one. At least half of those samecompanies also have a values statement. A corporate credo appears to exist in about one-third ofall large U.S.-based firms. Interestingly, while fewer firms seem to have a corporate credo, manyManagement Communication: A Case-Analysis Approach, Fourth Edition, by James S. O'Rourke, IV. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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