PATRICIA HARNED:17MAR10
29/3/10
09:37
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High principles Now in her fifth year as President of The Ethics Resource Centre, Patricia Harned talks to HRM about the current state of American business ethics. Have you seen many changes in trends in the years you have been working with the Ethics Resource Centre (ERC)? Patricia Harned. Yes and no. Some things never change. I think that the field itself has become quite complex. The number of regulations that apply to businesses with respect to ethics and compliance has grown exponentially in the time that I’ve been here. But some of the basic things that companies struggle to figure out how to prioritize – ethics, scandals, conduct – those have not really changed a whole lot. The National Business Ethics Survey is conducted every two years – with the one preceding the 2009 report obviously being the 2007 report. Since that time, with the recession and the economic crisis, industries have been turned on their heads in many ways.
we found was the opposite – the impact of the recession has been that ethics are good. People are being more careful and more mindful of company standards and they’re more willing to report misconduct when they see it. Why do you think that is? PH. I think it’s probably two things. One, the people that are most likely to really engage in wrongdoing are probably laying low, they want to keep their jobs at the moment. But also, some of the difficulties we’ve seen in the financial services industry have led business leaders to talk to their employees about how they’re going to do their business and how they’re going to survive in a way that employees have interpreted as being very ethical in what they’re doing. So, I think ethics has become much more of a daily part of discussions during this timeframe.
“When ethics is a performance goal, people take it more seriously”
What impact would you have expected the recession to have had on work like that? PH. We fully expected when we were fielding that survey that the findings would be terrible, that in the recession people would be driven to cut corners, to sacrifice the standards of the organization just to be able to stay in business. And when people tighten their belts and they’re operating out of a sense of fear, you would think that all the rules don’t apply anymore, you just need to survive. In fact what
Just after the release of the 2009 survey, you were quoted as saying: “Research suggests that the improvement in ethical conduct will be temporary.” What do you think the focus should be for those companies that are trying to instill an ethical sensibility into their workplace culture? PH. I think the first step is to do some kind of assessment of their organization right now, to be sure that the findings
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