This months' Human Resource Director Magazine had an interesting piece on ethics interviewing the GM HR of ANZ, Suzette Corr.
The big takeaways from the interview are actually two quotes. They obviously struck the HRD editor as well as he (Ian Hopkins) also referred to them in his editor's note inside the front page.
Firstly was this:
My take on integrity is it's the personal drive to do what's right. It's to advise on in what's right. It's to advise without fear or favour and to have the moral character to not just know right from wrong, but to speak up and challenge as necessary... It's in the actions you take rather than just a trait of who you are.
What really struck me from this quote is it moves beyond just an ethical stance but rather looks towards one's actions and to be able to take those actions with courage of unbiased thought.
The other was in reference to how CHRO's and HRD's can often find themselves leading organisations of thousands or tens of thousands of people and their capacity to drive positive change is particularly significant.
Imagine the powerful force for good HR could be if these people, whose profession is humans, embraced an understanding of ethics and integrity and acted upon and spoke up to ensure the right thing was done?
This got me thinking back to a podcast I heard from Radio National's All In The Mind years ago about morality and so I went on a search. Fortunately I found it surprisingly quickly! It's titled Moral Minds: The Evolution of Morality and while it doesn't directly reference the organisational context, I believe it still has worthwhile items to ponder on. Here All In The Mind interviews Mark Hauser, Professor of Psychology and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Richard Joyce, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.
Below are two extracts from the show. Both have differing and interesting implications when we look back to the workplace. With Marc it relates to distance (physical and hierarchical/organisational), action vs inaction and why sometimes people might be inclined "put things under the rug". With Richard it delves into areas like organisational politics, unwritten cultural norms and conflicting obligations.
Marc Hauser:
So where we're making progress on this is that we built about three years ago a website called The Moral Sense Test which now after about three years has somewhere like 300,000 subjects from around the world. And on that website people log in and tell us where they're from, their religious background, or educational background, age and so forth. And then they proceed to take many of the kind of classic moral dilemmas that you know people like Richard and other moral philosophers have invented to try to get some purchase on the nature of people's intuitions.
Here's some examples of the kind of things that seemed to cut across culture, at least with the sample we have.
As far as we can tell across this very large sample of people, people judge actions that cause harm as worse than omissions of an action that caused exactly the same harm. People consider a harm that is intended as worse than the same harm that is foreseen...
...why is it that people think that using somebody as a means to an end is not OK, whereas something that maybe harms one but for a greater good, under certain circumstances, it might be OK.
Richard Joyce:
If it's true that human ancestors lived in an environment where reciprocity was extremely important to them, which almost certainly they did, then there's a question of 'well, what does morality actually add to the reciprocal exchange'? And the idea that I've been examining is that it bolsters motivation. It's all very well to give something to somebody cause you like that person, but if in addition you feel that you're morally obligated to pay them back in exchange for something they gave you on a previous occasion - that is perhaps the evolutionary function of the moral faculty. That it bolsters motivation in the social sphere to make us better co-operators.
If you have the time and interested in the subject, I highly recommend you check out the article and podcast.
