Organisational Behaviour, David Jones

Organisation: David Jones

David Jones is a large department store chain in Australia that aims to deliver a designer orientated collection throughout the capital cities and key suburban locations. The department store chain has been influential in Australia since 1838 with David Jones' original mission was to sell "the best and most exclusive goods" and to carry "a stock that embraces the everyday wants of mankind at large." Today, the David Jones organisation employs approximately 10,000 employees across 37 stores throughout Australia, is a member of the stock exchange and has its own credit card teamed with American Express. The management philosophies carried out by the department store David Jones have been envisaged through a set of values which help carry out the company's daily tasks. The values are behaviours that encourage transparency, risk management, accountability, value creation, fair dealing and protection of the stakeholder's interests.

On June 18th 2010, David Jones and its CEO Mark McInnes declared a mutual termination of the leadership position in the organisation, due to the allegations relating to the sexual harassment of the young publicist Kristy Fraser-Kirk. The media attention and circumstances during and after the scandal are detrimental to the standards of organisational behaviour. The unfavourable leadership tenancies that jeopardise the value based reputation, teamed with the lack of respect for women in the workplace via harassment evoke unnecessary stress within the workplace for all employees, especially Miss Fraser-Kirk.

Sexual harassment within the workplace is stressful and mentally damaging for the individual faced with the harassment, as well as being damaging for the reputation of the organisation of which the incident occurred. The threat of an individual's wellbeing is depicted as well as ‘the direct affront to the victim's personal dignity and the harasser's interference with the victim's capacity to do the job.'(Sims, 2002) Within organisations ‘managers have a legal and ethical obligation to ensure that they, their colleges and employees never engage in sexual harassment, even unintentionally.' (Sims, 2002) David Jones needed to have a loyal team of employees that were briefed on the organisations policy regarding harassment of any sort, due to its interference with work performances and the negative working environment that it produces. Sexual harassment instances are very stressful for the individual; the victim needs to be brave to stand up for themselves due to the fact that victims of sexual harassment ‘are expected to endure more stress while these incidents are investigated.' (McShane, Olekalns & Travaglione, 2010)

The impact on the organisation when leadership is inappropriate leads to public scrutiny and questioning of the organisations ethical practices and values. The longer term impact of poor behaviour whist in leadership is that employees might begin to follow the leader's unethical behaviour rather than consider the organisations values and considerations. In relation to David Jones ‘it is not just the sexual harassment that the board should be looking for as being systemic in their organisation, but the sheer arrogance of position that goes with sexual harassment as behaviour.'(Dwyer, 2010) If the board sees no problem with the particular behaviour, ‘productivity may fall as individuals in the organisation spend time discussing and spreading rumours about the inappropriate behaviour and lose focus on what was the goal of the organisation.'