Ethics and Organizational Decision Making: A Call for Renewal

by Ronald R. Sims

Overview

Decision making is the critical key to survival in the future. It is the contention of this book that we must increase our understanding of organizational decision making in general and ethical decision making in particular. Ethics underlies much of what happens in modern organizations. Organizations, which institutionalize ethics, develop a culture based on ethical values and consistently display them in all their activities. They derive a number of positive benefits: improved top management control, increased productivity, avoidance of litigation and an enhanced image that attracts talent and the public's good will.

The major aim of this book is to provide a better understanding and integration of the variables that are important to institutionalizing ethics within any organization. It pays particular attention to decision making, organizational culture, the role of management, and groupthink. Clear lessons from real firms' experiences are drawn: firms can counteract and turbanaround unethical behavior by learning to cope with inevitable conflicts, by introducing disagreement as part of the decision making process, by installing an effective training program and by changing employee-employer contracts. The author takes corporate CEOs, human resource managers and scholars from understanding the problem, to what it takes to establish, institutionalize and maintain ethics in organizations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780899308609
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/21/1994
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Lexile:	1380L (what's this?)

About the Author

RONALD R. SIMS is a Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business, College of William and Mary. His recent works include Diversity and Differences in Organizations (Quorum, 1993), Training and Enhancement of Government Organizations (Quorum, 1993), Managing Higher Education in 21st Century (Quorum, 1991), and Experiential Learning Approach (Quorum, 1990).

Table of Contents

Preface
Ethics in Organizations
Ethics and the Challenge of Ethical Behavior in Organizations
The Nature of Decision Making in Organizations
The Relationship Between Groupthink and Unethical Behavior in Organizations
Leadership and Unethical Behavior in Action
Countering Unethical Behavior
Leadership and Ethical Behavior: An Ethical Turbanaround
Ethics in Organizations: Can We Teach People How to Become Ethical
Maintaining Ethical Employee-Employer Contracts
Institutionalizing Ethics in Organizations