Behind every major Australian corporate scandal of late, can be found an organisational culture where unethical practices went unchecked.  Yet, how cultures become the systemic source of unethical practices is perhaps the least explored area by compliance professionals.

So much compliance today essentially looks for ethics in the breach not the practice. Opportunities to hone ethical competence in the workplace is essential because when it comes to human behaviour, there is no standing still.  If employees don’t continuously work on their ethical competencies, they lose moral competence.  Ignoring culture as a key critical risk area is akin to not seeing the woods for the trees.  As demonstrated by recent case histories from Visy and Amcor, setting standards was the easy part, managing day to day behaviour requires a lot more effort.

So too the AWB inquiry  indicated  employees found themselves simply conforming to the organizations’ way of doing business, its culture, so that many acted in ways not of their choosing.  They were faced with the option of conforming or having to leave; it’s a familiar story…

The sad reality is that an ethical vacuum exists in most workplaces because ethics is not discussed and the default message is that ethics are not as important as meeting specified and monitored kpi’s. Instead, it’s left to individual discretions to decide what’s permissible or not and when the proverbial hits the fan it’s blamed on a few rotten apples rather than a unhealthy barrel.

The power of organisational culture is that it hides more than it reveals and it hides best from its own members so insiders get blindsided as to what has become unacceptable practices. Does an ethical vacuum exist in your organization?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 11:40 am and is filed under Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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