Understanding Ethical Diversity in Organizations

E thical diversity abounds in organizations. That is, there are diverse beliefs among employees, managers, and executives in organizations as to what are the most ethically appropriate or inappropriate courses of actions to take in their daily workplace situations. Consider the following five examples of ethical diversity, each of which comes from the authors’ direct work experience, consulting, or current events reported in the trade and general press. First, from operations management, some employees believe it is ethically right to use the time clock closest to the building entrance when they clock in and out. In contrast, others believe it is ethically right to use the time clock closest to their assigned work areas. Why the divergent ethical judgments? Second, from human resources management, some managers believe it is ethically right to give uniform raises to all employees when raise money is extremely limited. Others believe it is ethically right to continue to give performance-based raises in such circumstances. Why the divergence? Third, from organizational downsizing, some managers believe it is ethically right to focus only on performance evaluations when conducting layoffs, while others believe it is ethically right to consider corporate initiatives and employee personal considerations. Why? Fourth, from risk management and public relations, some executives believe it is ethically right to perform surveillance on employees’ nonworkplace conduct, while others believe it is ethically right to limit surveillance to workplace conduct. Why? Fifth, from organizational governance, some executives believe it is ethically right to outsource as much work as possible to firms in foreign countries, while others believe it is ethically right to retain as much work as possible in house. Why? The answer to all the preceding ‘‘why’’ questions is that employee’s ethical judgments diverge because of the great diversity in their personal moral codes. Some two decades ago, the first author and marketing professor Scott J. Vitell sought to develop a framework that would help marketing students and practitioners understand the kind of diversity in personal moral codes that would lead to divergent ethical judgments. They developed a model of marketing ethical decision making that was first published in the Journal of Macromarketing in 1986. Through time, the model and the theory underlying the model came to be labeled in the ethics literature as, simply, the Hunt– Vitell (H–V) model of ethics. Also through time, the model was used extensively in both teaching ethics and guiding research. Subsequently, it was noted by ethics researchers that the theory and model were equally applicable to business ethics in general, and even more generally, to ethics in nonworkplace situations. That is, the H–V model is now viewed by many ethics researchers as a general theory of ethical decision making (and not just a theory applicable to marketing and other business situations). Since its original development, the H–V model has undergone rigorous empirical testing in numerous disciplines and contexts. The results have uniformly supported the theory as being useful in explaining and predicting ethical decision making. It should be noted that the purpose of the H–V model is to describe, explain, and Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 202–216, 2007 ISSN 0090-2616/$ – see frontmatter 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.orgdyn.2007.03.007 www.organizational-dynamics.com