Ethical Dilemma

Ethical Dilemma

Ethical Dilemma

Introduction

Do HR managers care about ethics? Or are they the ethical ones, faced with having to deal with line managers whose only focus is high performance? A session on ethical dilemmas filled the room at the 2003 national convention of the Australian Human Resources Institute.

Rob Macklin and David Ardagh, both from Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, have been conducting this session on dealing with ethical dilemmas in the workplace for several years now. However, interest in the topic by HR practitioners is stronger than ever.

Macklin and Ardagh started the session with a brief introduction to the topic. They asserted that the HR role contains some inherent ethical tensions. For example:



The ethical value of openness and honesty is often in tension with the requirement to keep corporate matters confidential. While the moral demand is often clear, HR managers are also frequently confronted with situations where harm or dishonesty will result from following the company policy;

The demands of justice are sometimes in conflict with the need to care. The HR manager may see that the consequences of administering justice in a particular situation are outweighed by considerations of compassion, or the public demands of justice may be assessed as unduly harsh;

The organisation's pursuit of high financial performance will often present situations where the niceties of ethics form a hindrance.

The Manager's dilemma

Following this introduction, Macklin and Ardagh present a video that was made by Charles Sturt University. The video presents a scenario where the HR manager of a country timber mill is faced with an ethical dilemma. The manager knows that the mill will be closed down in 12 months, but his task is to ensure that it remains in production until it closes.

He has to fill a position for a maintenance person, and the best candidate for the job is from Sydney. The candidate asks about the future of the mill, as he does not want to relocate and then find himself out of a job. What should the manager do?

The group then discusses this scenario. Macklin and Ardagh show the responses that have been given in previous sessions they have run. They say a large number of participants (HR managers) have said the person in the scenario should tell the truth. This is a difficult choice, as the manager has been told to keep the closure confidential. Some participants have said the opposite - the manager has a duty to the company to keep the mill going, and to keep confidentiality, so the untruth is justifiable.

Other participants have suggested more exquisite solutions. One suggested that the manager should keep silent about the closure during the interview (where another manager, not in the know, was present), but telephone them later to warn them in some way. Another suggestion was that the manager could say they did not know about the mill's future, but people at the session said this was essentially still a ...