In every human endeavor, including ethics, leadership can make the difference between success and failure. As part of its National Business Ethics Survey, ERC set out to learn what?s required for successful ethical leadership and what leaders can do to set an ethical tone at the top and inspire employees to do the right thing. With data from the survey, we explored the relationship between management behaviors and employee conduct. Among the most notable findings: the most significant factor in ethical leadership is employees? perception of their leaders? personal character. Leaders who demonstrate they are ethical people with strong character have a much greater impact on worker behavior than deliberate and visible efforts to promote ethics.
The ERC Fellows Program formed a working group to assess the many ways in which companies combat workplace retaliation and to share leading practices we identified during our assessment with the ethics and compliance community. Our first offering to the field consists of observations and considerations for companies to consider when developing or revising a non-retaliation policy. The working group reviewed, discussed, and evaluated the characteristics of publicly available non-retaliation policies as well as a sampling of non-retaliation policies of our member organizations. We also conducted a review of the ethics & compliance literature on retaliation. The working group recognizes that policy content and level of detail will vary for each organization depending upon its culture, industry, and internal processes. We therefore offer organizations questions to consider when drafting or revising content for a non-retaliation policy rather than prescribing specific policy elements to adopt.
A wealth of studies have shown that women have historically experienced discrimination in the workplace, earned less money for equal work, and found it harder to reach leadership positions. In recent years, as more women have climbed the corporate ladder, studies have looked for gender-based differences in leadership styles. But few of these studies have focused on ethics and whether male and female leaders approach it differently. To address this gap, the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI), decided to take a look at the critical question through a randomized re-survey of a portion of respondents from the National Business Ethics Survey® (NBES®) 2013.
Senior corporate executives are under great pressure to build and maintain strong organizational ethics programs. The stakes are high for any organization that fails to make ethics a priority and then finds itself embroiled in scandal. Public perceptions?often driven by the media?spoil a company?s reputation and weaken its brand value. Lowered trust among investors can devastate a company?s ability to attract support for growth. Regulators and lawmakers may move swiftly to punish and/or further regulate those who step outside accepted ethical boundaries. Today, many organizations are choosing to consolidate the critical responsibility for ethics and compliance programs under a chief ethics and compliance officer (CECO). But the specific roles and reporting lines for this relative newcomer among corporate management positions are not always clearly defined; many CECOs report feeling set up for failure due to insufficient authority or inadequate resources. This paper is intended to serve as the starting point for a dialogue within corporate management circles? particularly among CEOs, boards of directors and the CECOs themselves?about the proper placement, qualifications, and responsibilities for a leader of the corporate ethics and compliance function.
Using data from the 2004/2005 industry sector survey, the research team examined the extent to which perceived pressure to behave unethically was linked to actions on the part of top managers, supervisors and coworkers, and the relative impact of these employee groups on perceived pressure to behave unethically. The analyses uncovered the following insights which will help guide individuals responsible for shaping the ethics-related environments within organizations.