Interpersonal Misconduct in the Workplace

A decade ago, companies made headlines for problems such as bribery, financial manipulation, and fraud. The attention has shifted, though. For the past year, mistreatment of employees, especially abusive behavior, sexual harassment and discrimination, has joined data privacy as a critical issue of our time. #MeToo and #TimesUp have given a name to the larger effort to unearth problems that have festered and to find a path towards safer more respectful workplaces. Efforts to expose the issues have uncovered repetitive patterns of interpersonal misconduct in organizations around the world. Our heightened awareness of interpersonal misconduct and the toll it takes on individual employees and organizations is a positive development. But more needs to be known about the nature of the issues, the scope of problems, the factors that exacerbate problems and strategies for fostering respectful workplaces. As part of its Global Business Ethics Survey (GBES), the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) gathered data to inform the conversations taking place in workplaces and to suggest a constructive path forward. As a result, this report provides answers to the following questions: 1. What does interpersonal misconduct (abusive behavior, sexual harassment, and/or discrimination) look like in the modern workplace? What is the frequency of these behaviors? 2. How does interpersonal misconduct occur in the workplace? What are the greatest risk factors?

2024-03-21T00:53:12-04:00Sunday, April 22, 2018|
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Measuring the Impact of Ethics and Compliance Programs

Corporations have historically organized their ethics and compliance (E&C) programs around a priority to align with legal and regulatory expectations. Yet increasingly, organizations are going above and beyond historic regulatory risk mitigation. With more and more organizations committing to higher quality programs, it begs the question: does it make a

2024-03-21T00:54:55-04:00Sunday, April 22, 2018|
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The State of Ethics and Compliance in the Workplace

Historically, ECI reported findings from the research under two titles: the National Business Ethics Survey, which provided measures of US workplaces; and the Global Business Ethics Survey, which expanded the study to include workplaces around the world. In 2017, ECI updated both the US and global measures, now under a single banner of the Global Business Ethics Survey. This report, The State of Ethics & Compliance in the Workplace, summarizes our latest findings, focusing only on responses from employees across the United States. This impactful report follows the format that ECI has been delivering for more than a decade related to US workplace behavior. For more global information visit our interactive website of 2018 Global studies. This is the first report of a four-part series in 2018. This report focuses on the four major outcomes that ECI has found to be critical measures of organizational conduct. When organizations prioritize integrity, employees are: --Less likely to feel pressure to violate ethics standards; --Less likely to observe misconduct; --More likely to report misconduct they observe; and, --Less likely to experience retaliation for reporting. Additionally, this report provides an overview of the current strength of companies? ethical cultures, which significantly influence workplace conduct. Lastly, the report concludes with recommendations for business leaders who are committed to a high standard of integrity in their organizations.

2024-04-09T17:18:27-04:00Sunday, April 22, 2018|
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Trouble at the Top

Corporate misconduct is nothing new to the American public. Headlines announcing business transgressions crop up with depressing regularity. According to one survey, only 15 percent of Americans believe business leaders to be truthful.

2024-03-26T00:32:20-04:00Thursday, April 5, 2018|Leadership|
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Ethical Leadership Around the World

Ethical leadership has long been a topic of interest in the ethics and compliance community and a pointed research focus at the Ethics & Compliance Initiative. Past research conducted in the United States and at multinational organizations has consistently shown that: 1) Ethical leadership is a critical factor in driving down ethics and compliance risk; 2) Leaders have a rosier view of the state of workplace integrity, and often have more positive beliefs than employees further down the chain of command; and 3) The quality of the relationship between supervisors and reports goes a long way in determining whether employees report workplace integrity issues to management. The Global Business Ethics Survey allowed us to test these ideas in a more global sphere, to see if these trends held on different continents and in vastly different cultures. We learned that when it comes to ethical leadership and its impact on workplace integrity, our 13 GBES countries were far more similar than different. Key trends were (nearly) universal, which gives us renewed confidence about their applicability in numerous regions and cultures.

2024-03-22T14:07:54-04:00Saturday, April 22, 2017|
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