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Corporate culture and ethics

by Miki Saxon

Image credit: Kate_A

Corporate culture is the darling of today’s pundits, toasted and blamed for enhancing, allowing, enabling or contributing to every success and failure when it hits the media—and for good reason.

But is corporate culture also at the bottom of the amazing number of ethical lapses that have come to light over the last decade or so?

In a talk on ethics Bradley Preber, Grant Thornton’s partner-in-charge of its Forensic Accounting and Investigative Services practice commented that “Any company that continues having pervasive and systematic behavior problems with its employees must look at its culture to see if it could be partly what drives that unethical behavior. And if the recurring problem stems from upper management then this will have repercussions for the rest of the company. He added that culture is a factor that can be used to predict fraud and evaluate a company’s ethics.”

Moreover, the ethical breaches that surface shouldn’t come as a surprise.

According to Marianne Jennings, author of The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse and professor of legal and ethical studies in business at W. P. Carey School of Business, “All unethical organizations are alike; their cultures are identical and their collapses become predictable.” Moreover, there are seven warning signs for which you can watch,

  1. “pressure to maintain numbers;
  2. fear and silence in the ranks and leadership;
  3. young and inexperienced executives and a bigger-than-life CEO;
  4. a weak board;
  5. conflict;
  6. pressure to produce constant innovation; and
  7. a penchant for philanthropy that assuages guilt for questionable decisions.”

Just don’t expect this checklist to be posted in neon in your office or offered up on the company wiki.

Plus, there’s an entire gray area that although the actions may not be illegal they are unethical. It’s your responsibility to keep your head out of the sand, your eyes open and to recognize when you’re in that gray zone.

Just as you know that when something is too good to be true it probably is, know that if you’re wondering if something is unethical it probably is.

Do you see any of the seven signs in your company’s culture?

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