Audit of the Ethical Culture

The only way to determine if the culture is aligned to support ethical behavior is to conduct regular, comprehensive audits of all relevant cultural systems, both formal and informal. If the ethical culture audit determines that aspects of the current culture are not aligned to support ethical behavior, and the goal is to produce consistent ethical conduct, then the culture must change.

Any attempt to develop or change organizational ethics can benefit from an organizational change approach that includes a system-wide, long-term view. In addition, the approach should be based on the assumption that human beings are essentially good and capable of development and change.

The cultural approach relies on the idea that to be successful, any attempt to develop or change the organization’s ethics must take the entire cultural system into account. The change effort must target multiple formal and informal organizational subsystems. All of these subsystems must work together to create clear, consistent messages about what is and is not appropriate behavior in the organization. If subsystems conflict, confusion and mixed messages will result. Thus, the entire range of formal and informal subsystems must be analyzed and targeted for development and change.

This complex, multisystem approach to managing organizational ethics argues against any short-term, quick-fix solutions that target only one system. The idea that an organization could solve its ethics problem simply by establishing a code of ethics or by hiring a consultant to deliver a one-hour ethics training program becomes ludicrous when the complexity of the ethics culture is understood. The management of ethical conduct must be complex because it is influenced by multiple systems, each of them complex in itself. Thus the complexity of the solution must match the complexity of the problem. A solution that isn’t sufficiently complex will miss important information, make incomplete diagnoses, and produce overly simple and shortsighted solutions. The organization that creates a code of ethics in response to external pressure and files it away without making changes in other systems such as the reward system and decision-making processes is more likely making a negative statement about organizational ethics rather than a positive one. The informal message is that management is hypocritical and that the code of ethics serves no useful purpose beyond creating a facade. The same can be said of lofty values statements. For example, many of these statements talk about valuing diversity. But what happens when people look around the organization and see few minority managers? Executives need to understand that when they put a values statement in writing, employees expect a commitment to follow through. The bottom line about systems thinking is understanding that if an organization decides to get into the ‘‘ethics business’’ with a values statement, code, or training program, employees expect follow-through in other parts of the organization. A failure to follow through will be interpreted as hypocrisy.

The development of organizational culture takes place over a number of years; effective culture change may take even longer, as much as 6 to 15 years. It requires alterations in both formal and informal organizational systems that take time to implement and take hold. Resistances must be overcome. New rules and values must be reinforced via training programs, rites and rituals, and reward systems. Although not all organizational change efforts take this long, deep interventions in the organizational culture should be considered long-term projects.