The Public Organization & Managerial Ethics

Society rewards efficiency and political expediency and those these are two goals which do not always naturally coincide with that of an ethical organization. History is rife with examples of men who march tirelessly toward economics and for whom the choice to be wealthy (and fast) is more natural than the choice to promote business ethics and stamp out any conflicts of interest therein. These political factions are everywhere – on the job, in executive board rooms, and in politics. In fact, vested interests willingly cast aside many earnest attempts to compel more judicious action which creates an environment wherein lying, cheating and scandal become the organization’s culture (Yeager, Hildreth, Miller & Rabin, 2007). In their article entitled “The Relative Effects of a Supervisory Emphasis on Ethical Behavior Versus Political Responsiveness,” the researchers deal with the question of public integrity among employees of public organizations and the impact that managers have on ethics in an organization.

To that end, researchers reveal the results of very important research in which they sought to determine how big impact supervisors have on organization-wide ethics and how big that impact is among individual employees. In essence, one of the attending goals of this research was to gauge the effectiveness of ethics training and activity and to determine the amount of peer influence that ethical behavior has over non-ethical behavior (Yeager, Hildreth, Miller & Rabin, 2007, pp. 265-268).

What’s worse H. George Frederickson argues that as government pushes toward phases of “new public management” and attempts to reduce red tape in favor of expediency, ethical problems will be larger, more complicated and more destabilizing for government. Primarily, he notes that outsourcing governmental tasks to contract companies in a bid to make government smaller and in a not-so-veiled attempt to bypass a lot of ethical oversight will service market logic and increase competition in the short run but will create significant problems and “highly imperfect markets, influenced by politics, the lack of competition and serious information asymmetry [which unfairly favors] sellers” in the long run (Frederickson, 1999, pp. 316-319).

In summation, research has shown that financial public administration organizations have a duty and responsibility to: uphold ethics codes, to provide ethics training for every member of the organization (both contractor and employee) and to insist upon regular audits that serve as one form of oversight to catch unethical behavior. Researchers found that employees are positively impacted by ethics rules and purposeful training as well as responsible leadership from supervisors who not only promote ethics but behave in an ethical manner.

References

Frederickson, H. (1999). Ethics and the new managerialism. Public Administration & Management, 4(2), 299-324.

Yeager, S., Hildreth, W., Miller, G., & Rabin, J. (2007). The relative effects of a supervisory emphasis on ethical behavior versus political responsiveness. Public Integrity, 9(3), 265-283.