Ethical Consulting is a Contradiction
As social dynamism and complexity grows, the community requires rules and regulations which goes hand in hand with the evolution. The goal of these rules and regulations is to deal with the issues that might arise among the members of the community threatening their peace. The rules extend to the global sphere, where the process of globalization links different social systems. However, there are no pre-established rules to coordinate and integrate behaviour in this scope. Therefore, in all these issues, legality is insufficient and unsuitable to guarantee legitimate behaviour. The business environment always has internal contradictions. These reveal that the market requires to be regulated and to some extent, self-regulate to eliminate the internal-contradictions lying within it.
In the past, businesses operated in a society where people were in close relationships. Therefore the issue of ethics was not as complicated as in the modern days when the relationship between customers and business people comes when doing business transactions. The market involves the interactions between strangers (Exton, 2012). This reveals how important rules and regulations are essential in such an environment. With a view of management consulting, the work of consultants was simple back then since they were connected with their clients. However, as the community became more extensive, the complexity grew in management consulting. Nowadays, consultants need a lot of training and experience to be successful in their work.
Because both a consultant and the client are strangers, trust should be established so that honest conversation may take place. To realize a productive relationship, both the consultant and the client should understand their roles and responsibilities. In most circumstances, consultants do not know what is useful because they don’t understand how clients measure success. To serve customers efficiently, consultants need to make critical decisions. Concerning honest conversation, when something goes as not expected, the ethical consultant should immediately inform the client because covering it will create other problems. Any organization has codes of conduct that regulates professional behaviour (Mingaleva, 2013). It is, therefore, crucial for the organization to establish procedures for investigating individuals alleged to have violated their professional obligations. In order
to protect organizations from the potential threat that may arise in its operations, the law requires that they establish self-regulation that guarantees proper code of conduct among individuals. If the law governs self-regulation, they will mark a starting point of an organization. Legal acceptance makes ethical consultants adhere to the expected code of conduct in their professional practice (LoWman, 2013). It is worth noting the trained consultants have passed through an education system that is well polished and offers accurate information in an ethical consultancy that works when applied well. Therefore this personnel can address clients’ need as expected that the customers will be satisfied with the services offered. So, the role of laws is to protect other issues not contained in the organization’s operating procedures from arising.
Business Ethics Complexity
Business ethics is complicated since it is established in a complex system of relationship. It is of great importance to note that potential indirect ethical consequences face businesses. Therefore an organization must figure out the ethical consequences that are beyond a specific relationship and that directly affects its activities. It is vital to define ethics in light of the expected output when specific inputs are used. In some cases, some components are ethically relevant but exist outside the context of the relationship (DuVal et al., 2014). Having an ethical business behaviour that has the potential to induce unethical behaviour in the system is of no value. This because ethics expects to induce behaviour that creates a peaceful environment; which is conducive for all the players to work comfortable and are safe.
The success of an organization depends on the input of the employees. Therefore an organization needs to eliminate the ethical differences among them so that they may work together in collaboration. Collaboration helps employees to gain experience through learning from each other. Junior employees, for example, will have an opportunity to learn from their seniors in that process of working together (Aulisio et al., 2010). This reveals that where the workforce embraces the same ethical attitude at work improves the skilled expertise in the organization. Business ethics are felt in the external space; this is through how the employees serve clients. The organization should refine its ethics to consider customers’ needs. This will paint a good picture of the organization out there as focusing on social responsibility.
Business Ethics Paradox
Ethics in management and consulting takes place in environment whey the participants vary in terms of interests and functionalities. Additional, the variations encompass culture and the pursuit to defend such interests. In the social context, behaviours are the ever-changing yielding diverse approach of ethics. Negotiation behaviour, for instance, is dependent on the attributes of the individuals involved (Hagenmeyer, 2017). Nationality, culture and mentality have an impact on negotiation behaviour. This shows why the laws are different in different nations. Business ethics are naturally relative. They are dependent on the operative relationship of the people and the involved companies. Absolute business ethics possess the potential to cause misunderstanding, vulnerability and difficulties in communicating which is a threat to the operations of an organization
Conflict of interests naturally exists in every firm. Especially in the distribution of the created value. Each relationship or group of associations is conflicting with the other. For example, prices are reduced for the interest of the customer, but the implication is that the value that is shared among the employees, suppliers and banks reduces. These reveal the conflict of interest since paying the suppliers more means that other players are paid less (Laabs, 2011). The government also has a stake in the conflict because the company has to pay taxes. So, paying employees more salary would be a reduction in the amount of taxes paid to the government. The company, therefore, needs to implement strategies that allow the creation of value at the same time harmonizing the distribution process.
Measuring the interests of the counter in the ever conflicting interests and allowing it to act without harm is a fundamental ethical principle that each organization should have to mitigate the adverse consequences in its operations. However, in a business environment, interests existing in a relationship is not known because they are combined and distinguishing them is difficult (Petrick and Quinn, 2010). For instance, if the prices of the products an organization sells are equivalent to the cost of production, then they have little funds to allocate in the development of the apparatus and the physiological improvement of the interests of the parties involved in the organization’s operations. For buyer’s point of view, he/she can reduce the consumption of an input that can be used in achieving specific output.
The output of the seller is naturally the buyer’s input. It is, therefore, possible for the organization to respond to prevent high prices of inputs from lowering its production cost. This shows another form of conflict as each party aims to own benefit. It is, therefore, difficult to assess who is the right party is and the implication of the conflict in the economic arena. All these have the potential to interfere with the ethical principles of an organization. Consulting competitive relationships, this means that if the company finds a better consultant, it has the right to replace with the existing (Sternberg, 2010). The reason behind the replacement is the anticipation that the new one will give good results based on the opinions he provided. However, this has the potential to lower the reputation of an organization since customers had become acquainted with the other consultant. It is therefore crucial for the organization to consider the consequences before making such a decision.
Role of Data and Data Analytics in Ethical Consulting
Ethical consulting is not an easy thing for organization. The concept requires considerable investment in money and time. Since ethics involves values that the members of the organization, an expert is needed so that he may study the employees and offer the right guidance to the organization. The consultant given the task to study the organization needs to collect data in the organization and analyses them to gain insight into the behaviour that the members of the organization exhibit (Woermann, 2010). An example of the behaviour for which data can be collected for is fairness. The stakeholders might be willing to know the extent to which fairness is embraced in the organization. The consultant needs to collect data about in the organization on fairness. There are several ways of collecting data. They include observation, use of questionnaire and interviews.
The best mode of collecting data is by use observation goes himself to the organization and see if the management treats employees fairly. Use of interviews is also vital because it will give a chance the consultant to talk with the employees themselves and get the right information about how they are treated in the organization (Guerrette, 2018). However, the method may be flawed by the attitude the employee has toward the management. If an employee has a negative attitude toward the manger, he/she will claim the manager mistreats people. Thus collecting inaccurate data. This shows how the ethical consulting process is complex and may not help the organization attains its aim on ethics.
The consultant can take the data collected and organize them in a way that the organization can read and understand. This data can be kept in the organization’s archives so that it can be used for references. Also, this data can be analyze by the experts using theories that have been coined to extract vital information from this data. Data analysis requires an expert who can organize the data and put them in computer software that can give value that can be interpreted to gain insight from the data (Shin and You, 2014). The results from the software can be passed to the consultant to explain the organization the meaning of the information and the possible decisions to make.
Ethics are ever-changing. Somebody may be having specific behaviour today, but tomorrow he/she is exhibiting another. This makes the work of the organization difficult because it has to involve the consultants regularly to give advice which will affect its profit (Ozley and Armenakis, 2010). One important thing about data collection and recording is that it can be referred to in the future. In the event that the organization records the data about the behaviour exhibited in the organization. The work of the consultant is simplified. He needs to analyze the data and see the frequency with which the behaviour occurs and from this future can be studied to mitigate the possible consequences.
The ethical consulting concept has attracted several studies because they have found this topic one that demands extensive research. In one particular study, ethical consulting has to contradict has been explored using evidence of research. The research was carried out in 50 consulting firms, and in total, 200 persons were studied. The data was then collected through a survey with managers and from each company who are involved in the direct management of the company. The study found that there is no cooperation between advisers of the organizations (Newman, 2012). Advisers of the organizations are usually approached by the management to seek advice on the appropriate codes of conduct that can help the organization achieves its objective the study, however, shows that they breach the ethical codes.
From several studies that have been done, ethics consulting have been validated as a contradiction. As the behaviour of the people keeps changing, it is complicated for an organization to reach a point when the advice from a consultant is sufficient. Another reason that proved ethical consideration as a contradiction is the fact that the advisers of the company themselves are not ethical. They do not cooperate in their work. One of the critical ethical value of an organization is cooperation. When workers work on projects as a team, the complexity therein is simplified, thus helping an organization to attain an organization. If the advisers do not uphold this critical value, then their advice contradicts their actions.
References
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