Role of Ethics Training Programs in Organizations.



Role of Ethics Training Programs in Organizations.

Introduction

This paper discusses the ethical dilemmas and the role of ethics training program for helping employees in dealing with them. Basically, companies have two ways to act in ethical manner. One is proactive approach and the other is reactive approach. The first is proactive approach, in this approach the corporation identifies the benefits and necessity of acting in ethical manner, to avoid possible legal action by the government agencies and to avoid non-ethical behaviors, in order to keep the stakeholders happy, including customers and international human rights and environmental agencies. The second approach is more like dragging the feet in applying ethical codes in the organization until it becomes a threat to company's existence. It is obvious that, in today's fast information age, proactive approach towards application of ethics in organization is suitable.

Discussion

Ethical codes were first developing in response to corporate scandals that, companies claiming to care for the customers operate in very unethical ways. The traction was gained by the corporations in the mid-1990s. This was in response to Federal Sentencing Guidelines for organizations (FSGO) of 1991. FSGO is actually a minimum set of standards that helps organization in lessening up their penalties for misconduct in ethical realms (Edward, 1991). Many organizations comply with these minimum set of standards even the voluntary organizations. This requires the implementation of a high level oversight, establishment of a culture that is ethical, code of conducts, periodic measurements of effectiveness, and ethics training.

Ethics training has been given much more energy by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 (Tyler, 2005). This ensures that, publicly traded companies disclose whether, they have adopted a code of ethics for senior officers. Ethics training trend is increasing day by day. ERC research in showed that 54% of the employees surveyed responded that, their companies provide them ethics training (Tyler, 2005). An amendment has been done to the 1991 FSGO in the year 2004. This amendment has further spurred the revamping of their ethics training programs. This amendment emphasizes the stricter ethics training requirements and ensures that companies create legal, ethical company culture.

Ethics is now a topic for discussion in every form of business. Companies have identified the importance of behaving ethically. In order to make their goal of ethically behaving corporation, they have infused ethics and compliance a part of culture rather than just beating the notion of having ethics programs. This simply means that companies want more than complying with legal standards of ethical behavior. They want to be in a state of affairs that their activities cannot be labeled unethical in future as well.

While many companies are infusing the ethics compliance in their company's culture, many organizations begin with merely complying with the legal requirements to have ethics programs in place. This is done in order to gain legal liability protection (Braybrooke, and David, 1983). In its absence any ethical problems rising in the company can create serious legal charges against the ...