Ethical Filter

Value

Personal Source

with Examples

Justify the Value’s Position in the List. Include any challenges to employing these values consistently when making personal and organizational decisions.

Mutual Respect My current supervisor has exceptional interpersonal skills. She always tries to treat all of her employees equally. She never talks down to her subordinates. Which I think is what makes the emotional environment at work tolerable. I have had jobs in the past where the managers felt that they were above or better than the people that worked for them. I had a retail job in college where I worked as a sales associate. I had heard not only the store manager but regional management say that hourly employees are not important because they can be replaced. I placed Mutual Respect at the top of my list because I think in order to be an effective manager you have to have the respect of your employees. As the saying goes you can’t get respect without earning respect. If managers can involve their employees more in the decision making process it can make the employee feel like they are apart of the origination and that the company cares about their thoughts and opinions.

Personally I think this reverts back to the Golden Rule.

Integrity I work for an automotive manufacturer. Our factory workers are members of the United Auto Worker’s Union (UAW). This year we will be going through contract negotiations. There has been a downturn in the market this year which will affect the hourly employees during negotiations because the company will be asking for major cost reductions. Because of these requests our interim plant manager has been anticipating a strike. He has had our Materials department over produce so we can have a surplus in our inventory. Instead of being open and honest with the hourly employees on why the surplus was being created he told a half-truth. That a surplus was being created so that when demand increased during the third or fourth quarter the plant would have the available inventory to meet the needs of our customers without having to work overtime. This is a viable explanation, but not the total truth. To me integrity means keeping one’s word and being non-deceitful. This is gravely important in business. Employees need to believe in the information that is given to them by their management. Employees should be given the information that they need to hear, not what they want to hear. For example, the decision to conduct a lay-off can never be easy. But I think that an employee would rather hear, in advance, that a lay-off maybe in the near future for our company instead of saying “As of right now there are no talks of a lay-off but no one knows what the future may hold.”

Accountability I believe in holding people accountable for their actions. I think it is unfair to let one person off the hook for something but punish someone else for the same thing. FMLA is a