Picture yourself as an employee of a private company, would you report the company for any practices/behaviors that you think violate ethical policies? Why or why not?
Answers
Sometimes you sense that something isn’t right at work. You suspect that your finance colleague might be fudging numbers, your boss isn’t telling his manager the truth about an important project, or your co-worker is skipping out of the office early but leaving her computer on so it looks like she’s just down the hall. How do you know when it’s worth speaking up or not? Can you you protect yourself from potential consequences of calling out bad behavior? And when you do decide to say something, what do you say and to whom?
What the Experts Say
“Most of us don’t face a billion-dollar fraud or an issue where someone’s going to die tomorrow,” says James Detert, a management professor at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and author of “Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak.” But even minor issues can have serious consequences. “Ethical situations at work can be cause for alarm, and are also a normal part of doing business,” says Detert. The key is to not let either of those realities prevent you from making a rational decision. “When it comes to ethics, we think it’s a test of our moral identity, which makes us more emotional, less effective, and vulnerable to self-deluding,” says Mary Gentile, author of Giving Voice to Values and director of a program by the same name at Babson College. That’s why it’s important to not only know how to recognize an ethical issue but how to raise it — especially one that may be more of a gray area, she says. “There is no one strategy or answer for all situations,” she says. “The key is to practice ahead of time, before a situation arrives so you’re ready when it does.” Here are some tips on what to do if you find yourself in a sticky situation.
Answer & Explanation:
As an employee of a private company, I would report the company for unethical practices. Personally, I hold values and lawfulness highly. "Doing the right thing" is taught from young; "doing the wrong thing" brings me guilt, as well as fear of being an accomplice and being later discovered. Policies are in place for everyone, so for one company to be in violation without sanction is unfair to society as a whole.
There are a few considerations that may impact the decision of a whistleblower:
- Personal financial stability - if you need your job: reporting the company may cause you to lose your job if the company is shut down or put on an order for investigation
- Moral compass - whether or not someone holds value for the specific unethical practice situation
- Reputation - does the person want to be known to have reporting the company at which they were employed?
- Will - reporting the company at which you are employed is a serious decision, and can be easy to put off if the person is hesitant