Managerial Ethics and Organisational Design

Ethical codes are statements about the norms and beliefs of an organisation. These norms and beliefs are generally proposed, discussed and defined by the senior executives in the firm before being published and distributed to all its members.

NORMS

Norms are standards of behaviour; they are the ways in which the senior management of an organisation want staff members to act when confronted with a given situation. An example of a norm in a code of ethics would be:

Employees of the company will not accept personal gifts with a monetary value over RM25 in total from any business friend or associate, and they are expected to pay their full share of the costs of meals or other entertainment that have the value above RM25 per person.

The norms in an ethical code are generally expressed as a series of negative statements, for it is easier to list the things a person should not do than to be precise about the things a person should do.

BELIEFS

Beliefs in an ethical code are standards of thought; they are the ways of thinking in which the senior management of an organisation want employees to adopt. This is not censorship. The

intent is to encourage ways of thinking and patterns of attitudes that will lead towards the desired behaviour. Consequently, beliefs in an ethical code are generally expressed in a positive form. Our first responsibility is to our customer is an example of a positive belief that commonly appears in codes of ethics. Another would be „We wish to be good citizens of every

community in which we operate.