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Employees' report card on supervisors' ethics: No improvement - HR update - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

HR Magazine, April, 2002 by Terence F. Shea

If employers did anything in recent years to appear more ethical in the eyes of their employees, it didn't work. In fact, if the Enron collapse had been in the headlines when the latest "National Employee Benchmark Study" was conducted--in the second quarter of last year--employees' views of supervisors' ethics might have sunk, rather than remained steady.

The survey of 2,795 public- and private-sector employees was conducted by Walker Information, an Indianapolis-based business research firm.

Virtually unchanged since Walker's survey two years earlier are the percentages of employees who:

* See their organizations as highly ethical (59 percent).

* Say integrity is communicated well within their organizations (56 percent).

* Sense little pressure to cut corners on ethical or compliance issues (55 percent).

The good news? There was no increase in the percentage of workers who say their organizations are not highly ethical; it remained 15 percent. And the percentage of employees who regard their senior leaders as people of high integrity increased two points, to 49 percent.

Although 29 percent of the employees surveyed said they knew of or suspected ethical violations, about two-thirds of that group didn't report what they knew or saw, mainly because of insufficient facts, lack of confidence that the organization would respond, or the absence of an anonymous or confidential means of reporting.

The financial services industry scored high in six categories of workplace integrity, and technology did well in four. Insurance was second in some categories and third in others. The health services and communications industries were in the middle of the pack. Sectors at the bottom included manufacturing, government, retail and transportation.

The study was conducted by Jeff Marr, group vice president at Walker Information. He says the publicity around Enron might heighten awareness of unethical business practices--but he doesn't expect it to spark a long-term change in behavior.

"Human nature doesn't ever change," he says, "and the people leading companies are, to a person, highly competitive individuals." These individuals vow to win in their business category by playing fair and respecting others, Marr says, "but when they slip into gamesmanship or allow there to be 'unwritten rules' at work in order to win, the door is open to some real problems."

For more on Walker Information's studies, see the online version of HR Update in the members-only content section of www.shrm.org/hrmagazine.>