Leadership and Ethical Decisions

Importance of Ethical Behavior

In an organization, ethical behavior is imperative because it plays an integral role in helping it achieves the desired management standards (George et al., 2007). It also forms the culture of the organization and fosters the relationship between the stakeholders. Importantly, the analysis of the organizational ethical human behavior is very essential in making ethical managerial decisions, bearing in mind the need for consistency to the international principles of running the affairs of the company (George et al., 2007). In addition, ethical human behavior presents the dynamic relations, which the company could apply to realize its vision and mission based on the outlined objectives. Therefore, ethical human behavior comprises the fundamental aspects that the people in the organization should adopt in delivering better management services to the potential customers and other stakeholders. Those aspects are core when making ethical decisions about the code of behavior expected from the leaders.

The value of a comprehensive code of conduct to guide organizational activities is vested in the spirit of the leaders to exercise the organizational culture (Northouse, 2006). As a leader at ECG, one of the primary responsibilities is to help shape a culture of ethics at the organization. This is achieved if the leader behaves in a responsible way to serve as a role model in the organization. Since personal values can be hurtful and destructive in an organization, carrying out self evaluation to each worker employed at different level could assist the organization and its people to increase the respect to personal and organizational values, thus being able to boost the volume and quality of production (Northouse, 2006). In such situation, issues of negative values such as discrimination, which might be witnessed in most organizations, would not arise. The reason justifying this argument is that an effective process of evaluating the adherence to the outlined values ensures that each person understands the limits and the nature of relationship among the workers. This means that self assessment/evaluation helps in harmonizing the relationship between different categories of the workers, thus making it a better recipe for reducing prejudice so that there could be information flow from the higher level down the management system. Respect to the individual and organization values also increases the relationship that exists between different leadership levels, thus defines the relationship between the senior managers and their juniors.  

Codes of Conduct

The specific aspects of the code of conduct developed by this group include honest behavior, transparency in doing transactions, integrity in performing duties, non-discrimination practices when allocating resources. In realizing these aspects, the organizational leadership should implement the following practices. First, it should reduce prejudice through formulating and embracing a company’s culture of tolerance and ethical behavior among the different workers and could limit the extent to which prejudice is exercised (McWilliams &Matten, 2010). Restructuring the organization to be in line with the community will reduce the way in which individual workers perpetuate unnecessary prejudice in the company.

Second, since an organization includes  people from different diversities, defining the dangers associated with discriminating the people based on their gender, social status, race, tribe, and position of authority can also help the organization reduce the extent to which an individual employee or manager would perpetuate prejudice while performing his/her duties (Northouse, 2006). Third, a person holding any position in a company should maintain ethics during the articulation of his or her duties to reduce prejudice in workplace. Ethical behavior and practice in the workplace will ensure that the person carries out his or her duties diligently and morally (McWilliams & Matten, 2010). Apparently, a moral person cannot perpetuate prejudice against his/her fellow workers despite being at a higher rank that the other person.

Recommendations

Some of the activities in which the recipients should be involved to enhance awareness of the code of conduct in the company and instill a strong sense of organizational ethics at ECG include the following. First, the company should carry out leadership assessment. Essentially, self assessment is very useful in an organization because of its contribution that is enormously felt in the overall performance of the company (Parker, 2003). Since self evaluation is valid in most organizations, it assists in leadership development, strengthening the leader’s ability and power to articulate issue pertaining to the organizational duties (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2003). Notably, every person can manifest one or several attributes, which constitute his or her behavior and way of life in an organization. In assessing the personal attributes such as calm, firm and less defensive, one becomes able to link his or her behavior to the level of performance in the company (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2003). The progressive contribution of such individual to the development of the company could wipe out the vague or ambivalent behavior that is detrimental to the organization. This is useful for promoting peace and integration in the organization.