Ethical Misconduct

Ethical misconduct can be attributed to the differences in an individual’s culture, social awareness, and trends that exist and can potentially exist. There are several types of ethical misconduct that I had the opportunity to observe and on some occasions had to document. In my previous employment, I observed some ethical misconducts as a sales associate and supervisor/manager at a wireless company called Cell South. One ethical misconduct that I observed on numerous occasions was related to falsifying time reports and hires worked. Agents would manually input time worked that they did not work. I had to spend several hours trying to justify hours before they were signed off on for payroll. After weeks of overtime submitted, we had to insure time was accurate. Associates had to get overtime pre-approved to get credit. We noticed that agents were not clocking in and out for lunch breaks. They were also manually adjusting their time when they were showing up late for work and having other employees clock in for them. This caused the store location to use resources that were not in the budget. After we conducted an investigation, we had to discipline workers with write-ups and termination.

An ethical misconduct that was not in the financial scope was sexual harassment. I and other associates noticed the type of language that was used when a certain male associate conversed and interacted with a newly hired female associate. He would make small talk about her appearance that she clearly did not like. According to Mello (2015), a key concept in whether behavior constitutes sexual harassment is if the advances are of an unwelcoming nature. The female let the male associate know that she did not like the comments, but the male agent persisted. He thought that since she wasn’t rude, that it was okay to try and persuade her to indulge in his advancements. She was uncomfortable and since she was a new employee she did not want to cause any problems. The associates that observed the encounters decided to talk to her and realized she was not happy about the language and gestures. We talked to the male associate and he apologized. They began to have a great working relationship because he understood his boundaries. Even if the agent is attractive, you should always remain professional.

Other ethical misconducts that I observed was stealing and theft of wireless products, discriminating against employees, falsifying expense reports, and violating company policy related to internet use. To combat these growing number of ethical violations we had to have several training sections on ethics and behavior. All employees had to sign a document stating they understood the basics of company ethics. There was a code of ethics document uploaded on the company website for employees and all new and existing employees had to sign it. There were multiple instances of managers harassing their employee and creating unnecessary pressure on which leads to employee distrust. This caused employees to leave the organization and/or morale to be very low. Most of the time when new management arrived the morale would go up when the leader demonstrated strong leadership skills. Great leadership will usually dismiss ethical misconduct.