Betsy Stevens

Communicating Ethical Values: A Study of Employee Perceptions

Communicating ethical values is a serious issue for a number of organizations. While ethical codes are useful, they cannot exist alone. Organizations must make certain codes reflect the ideals of individuals in the organization and the ethical expectations must be clearly communicated. This study examined the sources (people) and channels (ways messages were received) that affected how employees learned about ethics. Results showed that training and orientation programs were affirmed as sources of learning along with teaching others. Codes and handbooks were also identified as ways employees learned about ethics in their organization. Ethical issues were discussed more frequently with fellow employees than with supervisors suggesting that managers could be more proactive about discussing ethics with employees.

Hospitality Ethics: Responses from Human Resource Directors and Students to Seven Ethical Scenarios

This study examines the responses of human resource directors and hospitality students to seven different ethical scenarios. Both groups were asked to rate these situations on their ethicality using a Likert-type scale. The directors and students decided that an act of theft was the most unethical, followed by sexual harassment, and an attempt to obtain proprietary information from another company. Expressing racial preferences in terms of servers was fourth. Directors rated all the scenarios ethically lower than did students, indicating that experience and heightened sensitivity to possible litigious situations may have played a role in perceptual differences.

Using the Competing Values Framework to Assess Corporate Ethical Codes

Ethical codes are written documents which presume to state the major philo sophical principles of an organization and to express its values and beliefs. The present study uses a competing values framework to describe the dimensions of ethical codes, telling us how change-oriented and transformational, instruc tional, informational, and relational they are in their communication and as representative of the organizational culture. Present results suggest that ethical codes are relationally and informationally dynamic, but exhibit transforma tional and instructional characteristics to a lesser degree. Findings suggest that ethical codes are generally framed from a defensive position designed to protect the organization from the employee and are not written, for the most part, using guiding or visionary language.

Hotel ethical codes: a content analysis.

Abstract Ethical codes are used by many organizations as a way of articulating ethical policies. While not a solution to unethical behavior, they are one way companies are trying to manage culture and the ethical values of their employees. This study analyzed the content of 42 hotel and management company ethical codes. It was premised that ethical issues which are most important to the organizations would appear in the codes. Hotel codes discussed conflict of interest most frequently, followed by personal character, customer relations, and payments and gifts. Management companies put customer relations first, followed by personal character, payments and gifts, and conflict of interest. Ethical codes do not appear to be as common in this segment of the hospitality industry as they are in corporate America.

Russian Teaching Contracts: An Examination of Cultural Influence and Genre

Teaching business communication in Russia involves operating in a high-context, oral culture where few documents are created. However, this article analyzes two Russian teaching contracts, rhetorically comparing purpose and audience, culture, gender, and the role of the individual versus the state. For historical, political, and economic reasons, less documentation is used in business transactions in Russia than is used in the United States. Subsequently, communication scholars have been afforded little opportunity to analyze Russian business documents. This study uses anecdotal episodes as a framework for examining Russian culture and analyzing university teaching contracts, concluding that the contracts are not only brief and factual but also reflect a more oral, less litigious environment than Western countries like the United States.

Hotel managers' perceptions of upward and downward communication.

Based on interviews with hotel managers, discusses the importance of communication, and examines problems in both upward and downward communication. Suggests various ways of overcoming these problems. Finally, reviews implications of these problems for managers.

Persuasion, Probity, and Paltering: The Prudential Crisis

In July, 1996, The Prudential Insurance Company agreed to pay a

Management Communication Strategy in Case Assignments: The Double-Message Approach

35 million fine for misleading sales practices after a task force of insurance regulators from 11 states and the District of Columbia found that Prudential agents had engaged in misconduct. This article examines Prudentials actions, its response to the ethi cal crisis, and the ways in which the organization communicated its response to stakeholders. Many of Prudentials sins were rhetorical: Agents misrepresented some products to customers. Charges of misrepresenting products to clients stem back to problems with its securities division, then known as Prudential-Bache. Prudential is making amends to its customers who were harmed by egregious sales practices, but it may take the organization a long time to recover customer goodwill and the damage incurred to its reputation.

Comparative ethics: how students and human-resources directors react to real-life situations.

Case studies, used extensively in business communication classes, offer an advantage by presenting students with real-life situations to which they can respond using writ ten business genres. Cases, however, limited by their cryp tic and condensed nature, may not fully communicate the context of the event. Understanding context has become increasingly important as issues of race, gender, and mul ticultual communication have emerged in the workplace. The double-message approach offers a solution by asking students to write a context memorandum along with their response to the case protagonist.