Is Ethics a Fad or a Foundation?
By Steve | June 27, 2006
I have been pondering this question since 1990, when I left a job in the real world of corporate America to become Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Corporate Policy in Chicago. Beginning in 1993, when I left the Center to start Ethical Leadership Group, I began predicting (or worrying) that business ethics was nearing its peak in terms of management interest. Any year now, I said to myself, and the ethics roller coaster car would come plummeting to Earth, and would, just perhaps, enjoy some smaller, safer ride back up in the distant future.
Then in 2001 along came Enron and Andersen, and I stopped predicting a business ethics crash.
However an article in the June 26 Wall Street Journal called "Why Management Trends Quickly Fade Away" leaves me wondering whether I should brush off that dusty prediction. In it Phred Dvorak writes about a study of management fads by Robert David and David Strang in the April/May edition of the Academy of Management Journal. It turns out that the life span of management ideas has shortened from a decade to fewer than three years. One of the major culprits: management consultants.
The study, says the WSJ, blames "'fashion surfers' - consultants who rush to offer services when an idea is hot, even though they don't have expertise in the area. . . . The authors suggest that the surge of less-qualified consultants contributes to ensuring frustration as businesses struggle to implement the idea. Eventually, interest falls off and the bloom ends."
I don't know if ethics and compliance management is at this point. I do see considerable frustration as companies try to implement ethics and compliance ideas that don't make sense for their businesses. Yet I hope we are not at the point of TQM in the mid to late 1990s.
For ethics as management fad is exactly what many employees fear. One of the discouraging sentiments we most often hear from employees in our focus group work is "this company is like Baskin-Robbins--a new management flavor every month. Ethics will be a flavor of the month too." Encouragingly, quite often another employee will pipe up and say something like "I hope not, because this company needs a foundation of ethics in order to be successful. It's about time we paid attention to this."
Research by Gary Weaver and Linda Trevino sheds further light on the power underlying these anecdotes. When employees believe that ethics and compliance efforts are merely tactics to protect the company, the efforts have no impact, or worse, actually increase cynicism among employees. When employees believe that ethics and compliance efforts reflect a true commitment, they have a chance of producing positive results.
Fad or foundation? Let's build the latter.
Comments
I know that this will sound like a lot of corporate heresy but Jerome Alexander has some refreshing new ideas on leadership and ethics. In his book, "160 Degrees of Deviation: The Case for the Corporate Cynic", Alexander emphasizes the value of skepicism and cycnicism from within the organization. What a provacative idea! Instead of ignoring, ostracizing and devaluing these views, Alexander recommends embracing them. This is written from a very down to earth perspective.
Posted by: S Howell | December 10, 2006 11:33 AM