II. New Learning
I don’t think this video was a great deal of new learning, but it did an excellent job of naming and categorizing many of the ethical problems that we have talked about thus far in this class. I appreciate how Dr. Jennings has a goal of proactivity and prevention in the work that she is doing. As she noted, many times with ethical collapse, people are left at the end scratching their heads and wondering what happened, when there were signs all along that people could and should have been paying attention to. Having this list as a point of reference is very handy because it does make readily apparent what the common signs of ethical collapse are. I also thought it was very interesting that she noted that in organizations that have experienced ethical collapse, all seven signs are present and fixing just one area can often have an impact on the other six areas.
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III. Personal Reflection
As I was watching this video, I was thinking back to several of the cases that we have talked about this semester, and also thinking back to the employers that I have worked for over the years. While I have never worked for an organization experiencing ethical collapse, I have worked for an organization that struggled with a few of the seven signs, and I have worked for organizations that proactively tried to be very ethical. One of the reasons that I moved out of a for-profit educational company was because of an intense pressure to maintain the numbers. Each month, we had goals for lead growth and it did not matter how we met those goals. Many of the leads that I was forced to chase were not viable, but that didn’t really seem to matter to the people at the top even when I consistently met my bottom line numbers. Another university that I worked for took conflicts of interest very seriously and required that all employees disclose and have approved any conflicts of interest on an annual basis. It is very interesting to reflect on the variety of ways that organizations handle these aspects of operating.
IV. Actions to be taken
These are things that I will definitely take into consideration when evaluating an employer or potential involvement with an agency or organization. To understand the environment around ethical decision making is very important, and I hope that this overview will help me to make better choices about my involvement with employers and organizations that strive to be ethical in all of their dealings.
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