A FIELD STUDY ON PERCEPTION OF EMPLOYEES TOWARD UNETHICAL WORK PRACTICES

Year 2013, Volume: 13 Issue: 26, 249 - 282, 01.12.2013

Salih Yeşil Selçuk Ferit Dereli

Abstract

In today’s business world, competitiveness has been the first priority and
staying alive and obtaining sustainable competitive advantages have become very
difficult. Within this circumstance, companies need to be creative, productive and reflect
ethical behavior so that they can achieve successful performance outcomes. Several
researchers have pointed out that ethic is associated with important performance outcomes
such as profitability, image, competitive advantages. On the other hand, according to
recent researches, ethical values such as protecting society and environment, respecting
fundamental rights of people and integrity as many others are being avoided by business
world across the globe. Because of this fact, ethic has been the subject of many research
and debate among the academe and practitioners. Especially ethic scandals that have
occurred in the recent times have taken the attention of people on ethic and as a result the
number of research on this topic has increased. The topic, ethic, is considered to be an
important and it is shown as one of the most influential factors over the long term life of
thecompanies.
Because ethic is a topic associated with every disciplines, firm and society and
thus defined in various ways and investigated. Therefore, it is really hard to define ethic in
a conclusive manner. Ethic is generally defined as complete moral values and rules that
explain what is right and wrong. Similarly there is no consensus on the definition of work
ethic. Work ethic concerns what is right and wrong in business situations and doing the
right things. There are various unethical practices that can be observed across the business
organizations. Based on the literature reviews regarding unethical practices across the
companies, the unethical practices can be divided into two categories; socio-cultural and
psychological. Socio-cultural types include favoritism, corruption, discrimination and etc.
Psychological type covers several practices such as mobbing, intimidation, cruelty, and
fraud and etc. There are several ones that can be added to list of both socio-cultural and
psychological types. The type and degree of these unethical practices vary depending on
the sector and company and people involved. There are various reasons that these
unethical practices are being experience within corporate world. The reasons behind the
unethical practices within firms derive from both personal and organizational
characteristics. In order to tackle the unethical issues, organizations need to monitor their
practices and identify the unethical practices and try to find the root cause of these
practices and try to resolve them. Sometimes organizations struggle to identify the
unethical issues and subsequently resolve them because the unethical issue has various
dimensions and it is difficult to determine whether the issue is ethical or unethical. These
types of situations are also likely to occur in business word and require more effort into
understanding and resolving the issue.
Business ethic is relatively new concept within business discipline and has been
a growing subject and has become more important topic especially during 1970s. As
explained above ethic and business ethic topics have become important research topics
and thus they have been investigated through several theoretical and empirical studies.
We also aimed to study this subject within Turkish context, considering the fact that
ethical values are not well recognized and well implemented within corporate business
world in Turkey as some recent studies have reflected. In order to increase importance of work ethic values, its understanding and its implementation, it is important to conduct this
type of research and spread the result within the corporate world. Academic world need to
put extra effort in this subject matter so that a considerable amount of research is
conducted in different sectors across the country.
In this study, we focused on the work ethic and tried to measure the attitude of
the employees toward unethical practices. Especially, this study investigates whether the
attitude of the employees toward unethical practices differ based on demographic
characteristics. This study cover both private and public sector. We selected one private
and one public institution and collected the data from the employees from both
institutions and then compared the result of the study between private and public sector.
We used survey technique for the data collection. We conducted a through literature
review and established the theoretical part of the study. We also searched for the best
scale in order to measure the research variables. We have taken the research scales from
the previous well known studies and conducted our research. Data was collected from two
institutions, one private and one public institution. In order to compare the result, data was
collected from both private and public institution.
In this study, the participants have reflected the similar views in general on
unethical practices based on different sector and demographic characteristics, yet there
were differences regarding to different unethical practices. This study compared the
results based on sex, age, education and sector (private and public). The analyses have
done on the public and private separately and mixed samples. There were some different
views on different unethical practices. The differences were occurred sometimes in terms
of the degree on “do not agree” or in terms of between “agree” and “disagree”. The results
reflected the fact that employees from both private and public sector have conscious
thoughts regarding the unacceptability of unethical practices in the workplace. This result
is satisfactory because employees from both public and private sector have opposite views
regarding unethical practices in the workplace. They have also reflected different degree
of views on the different value statements regarding unethical work practices.
These results show that both private and public sector organizations need to pay
attention to attitudes of the employees regarding unethical practices. They need to better
explain ethical and unethical practices. In order for organization to be ethical in their
practices and operations, they need to make sure that ethical practices are understood and
well implemented among the employees. For this reason they need to explain the
importance of ethic and its implication for the better view of the organization among the
public and other institutions and consequently for the successful performance.

Keywords

Ethic, Business Ethics, Unethical Behaviour

İŞ YAŞAMINDA ÇALIŞANLARIN ETİK OLMAYAN İŞ UYGULAMALARINA YÖNELİK TUTUM VE DAVRANIŞLARI ÜZERİNE BİR ALAN ÇALIŞMASI

Abstract

Son zamanlarda dünya çapında yaşanan çeşitli etik skandallar, etik konusuna dikkatleri çekmiş ve konu üzerinde çalışmaların artmasına ön ayak olmuştur. Konu, gerek özel gerekse kamu sektörü açısından büyük önem arz eden ve şirketlerin uzun dönemde yaşamlarını sürdürmelerinde en etkili faktörlerden biri olarak gösterilmektedir. Bu çalışmada çalışanların etik dışı uygulamalara yönelik algıları ölçülmeye çalışılmıştır. Özellikle çalışanların çeşitli özellikleri açısından etik dışı uygulamalara yönelik tutum ve davranışlarının farklılık gösterip göstermediği irdelenmiştir. Çalışma uygulama bağlamında özel ve kamu sektörünü kapsamakta ve elde edilen verileri karşılaştırmaktadır. Bu karşılaştırma sonucunda elde edilecek bulguların işletmelerde politika yapıcılar açısından önemli çıktılar ortaya koyacağı düşünülmektedir. Çalışma sonuçların kamu ve özel sektöre ışık tutması beklenmektedir.

Keywords

Etik, İş Etiği, Etik Dışı Davranışlar