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HRM3704- SU8 REVIEW
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Chapter 8 - Answers to review questions in textbook, page 1951 Identify the important concepts involved in a definition of business
ethics. How are these concepts relevant in the context of South
Africa?
Answer (Sec 8.1)
According to Peter Singer Ethics deals with values, with good and bad,
with right and wrong. We cannot avoid involvement in ethics for what we
do and we don’t do is always a possible subject of ethical evaluation.
Anyone who thinks about what he or she ought to do is, consciously or
unconsciously, involved in ethics.
Business ethics (or management ethics) focuses on moral standards as
they apply to organisations and the behaviour of organisational members.
Most decisions in business, particularly those relating to HR, have an
ethical component. Business ethics thus requires an integrated approach
to decision-making. An integrated approach recognises that managers
must take the moral point of view as well as make economically sound
decisions and act within applicable law. The moral point of view requires
that we act impartially and in accordance with reason, rather than on the
sole basis of self-interest or tradition. If ethics is about relationships
between people then business ethics is about relationships between
stakeholders and the recognition that their divergent interests must be
accommodated. Decisions must also be understood as involving different
levels of analysis, including the individual, the organisational, the
professional, the business system and societal levels. Employment equity
is a case in point.
In South Africa, ethics features in both the public and private sector. The
Constitution’s founding values of human dignity, the achievement of
equality, and the advancement of human rights and freedom. The second
anchor is the King (II) Report on Corporate Governance which has been
instrumental in moving ethics onto the agenda of corporate boards in
South African-based enterprises. It is important to note that the King
Report recognised that many enterprises need to put in place training
programmes to develop ethical competency and to develop organisational
processes that embed ethics into organisational cultures and operations.
The HR activities of recruitment, selection, training and development,
compensation and performance management, are not only a means to
gaining competitive advantage, they are important vehicles for
promulgating an ethical culture.
,2 What is the problem of dual loyalties and why does it arise? Provide
an example of dual loyalties that a HR professional might encounter.
Answer (Sec 8.2.1)
HR executives (who are literate in both financial and people skills) are in a
strong position to balance judgments of economic rationality with social
responsibility, evidence suggest that some HR practitioners find this
position burdensome. They see conflict between the understanding of
themselves as ‘friends of the workers’ and their new role as
management’s instruments of competitive advantage. There are
numerous examples of the problem. In some research, respondents cite
pressure to meet unrealistic or overly aggressive business objectives and
deadlines as the most likely factor to cause organisational members to
compromise their companies’ ethical standards. In a study by Schwoerer,
May & Benson’s 785 members of the Society for Human Resource
Management in the U.S.A. found that “many organisations report difficulty
establishing a balanced and coherent strategy between employee and
employer rights”. Hendry suggests that in the U.K. it has been difficult for
HR managers to act as a “neutral go-between” and that the HR manager
“became more unequivocally the representative of management, counter-
balancing the power of trade unions and individual rights enshrined in
legislation”.
Hendry’s suggestion is congruent with many U.K. researchers who have
been critical of the unitarist/managerialist view of HR, maintaining instead,
that workers and managers have different interests. The unitarist
assumption that the interests of employees are the same as those of their
employers, gives rise to the view that the proper employee-employer
relationship is one of partnership. This contrasts with the pluralist
perspective that recognises the possibility of diverse interest groups and
sources of loyalty or even worse, inevitable conflict between employers
and employees. A paradigm shift from pluralism to unitarism is
problematic. On the one hand, treating human resources as valued
assets, integrating HR policies into the business strategy and striving for
employee commitment through the management of culture, rather than
seeking compliance with rules and regulations, can be viewed as
beneficial to both employees and employers. On the other hand, these
practices may allow labour to be used as business needs dictate and can
therefore be thought of as serving primarily the interests of employers.
Moreover when corporate ethics and corporate culture are seen solely as
systems for controlling behaviour, they function at the lowest level of moral
development. Not surprisingly then, the nature and role of socialisation in
the workplace raises myriad ethical issues for HR professionals charged
with developing corporate cultures and embedding ethics into them. This
, is because the process of socialisation or induction into an organisation’s
culture tends to move beyond fostering knowledge of cultural norms and
values, to promoting the internalisation of corporate values by individual
members. According to Hoffman it is moral autonomy that enables
corporate cultures to be critiqued.
Developing strategies and policies that protect employee interests, yet
balance operational and human resource needs, is a difficult mandate
because it requires HR professionals to quantify the contribution of human
resources to organisational performance in ways that do not compromise
respect for, and the dignity of, individual organisational members. It is not
surprising therefore, that HR professionals may experience some
ambivalence about the pursuit of competitive advantage, particularly when
one considers that HR activities such as staffing, compensation and
training, have a direct impact upon organisational members in a way that
other business functions, for example, sales, marketing, finance and
production, do not.
3 Evaluate the appropriateness of the professional code of conduct of
the South African board for Personnel Practice (SABPP). How
effective is the code in providing guidance to HR professionals who
face the problem of dual loyalties? Why?
Answer (Sec 8.2.2)
When faced with conflicts of dual loyalties many professionals turn to their
profession’s code of ethics for guidance. Professional codes of conduct
serve as “moral anchors”, embody a profession’s values, help it to
establish an ethical climate and provide a framework for evaluating
alternative courses of action. Professional codes of conduct can also
reassure stakeholders (the public, employees, managers and
shareholders) that a profession’s activities are underpinned by moral
principles, and provide stakeholders with a benchmark by which to
evaluate the ethical performance of a profession.
The South African Board for Personnel Practice (SABPP) is a professional
body for managers, practitioners, consultants, academics and students in
the field of human resource management and has a membership of over
7000. The pre-2006 Code of Professional Conduct from the SABPP
somewhat ambiguously stated that, ‘registered members of the human
resources profession are obliged to uphold certain standards in their
practice, both in the interests of the public and their calling’.
At its Board meeting in August 2006, the SABPP approved in principle a
new Code of Conduct which appears to directly recognise the problem of
conflicting or dual loyalties and gives a clear statement on them to its
members (see Table below). In part, the SABPP Code states that:
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