Lecture
The subject of management is the head, or manager (Eng. manager - superintendent, director, head, etc.). His tasks in managing a company or firm can be reduced to the ability to skillfully combine the performance of the following functions:
Such are the functional tasks of management as a whole. The contemporary level of development of science and technology places high demands on the level of professional competence of a manager specializing in a given field. In addition, any successful manager, regardless of field of activity - whether production, commerce, finance or show business - must possess skills in working with personnel, must constantly take the human factor into account in solving management problems, and must abide by the unwritten but generally accepted rules of ethics.
Ethics includes a set of principles that make it possible to assess the behaviour of a person or group of people as right or wrong. As applied to management, these are principles for the moral assessment of a manager's behaviour toward the organization's staff, partners, consumers, competitors, and government bodies. Principles establishing what is good in a leader's behaviour and what is bad, what he can and should do from the standpoint of morality, and what he should not do, even if it does not break the law. Unlike normative behaviour of a leader, which is regulated by written laws and rules, ethical norms cannot be fixed by legislation and are therefore not obligatory. And yet the success of management depends to a great extent on observance of these norms, and their violation can inflict irreparable harm on the organization. The following fairly common phenomena can be cited as examples of unethical management:
In a number of cases ethical norms coincide with normative ones, which makes them easier to fulfil. Such is the case, for example, with observance of the law (law-abidingness is ethical).
Immoral and at the same time unlawful are: deceit, fraud, corruption, theft, causing material damage, abuse of official position, slander, extortion, forgery of documents, negligent attitude toward work, and deliberate violation of safety regulations.
In most cases, a manager's ethical behaviour is not regulated by legislation. Examples of violations of moral norms that do not entail criminal prosecution, but are nevertheless impermissible in management, can include:
The ethical principles of management are not something fixed and final. Social, cultural, and economic development places ever new moral and ethical demands on the manager.
Today the circle of ethical norms of management includes:
A violation of ethical norms is considered to be:
It is a direct duty of the manager to induct the organization's personnel (and above all himself) into ethical behaviour. For this purpose, work must be planned and systematically carried out to study the ethics of management, to foster the moral education of the collective, and to monitor compliance with ethical norms.
To carry out this work, special ethics commissions with appropriate powers may be created within an organization. In some organizations the functions of such a commission are assigned to a special official - an ethics advocate. He is said to be, as it were, «the ethical conscience of the organization». Ethics commissions are also created within associations of entrepreneurs and managers, and public organizations working in the economic sphere, etc. The role of these commissions is very great, and their authority is unquestionable. The commissions include the most respected and authoritative businessmen, managers, and lawyers. A decision of the ethics commission that condemns a manager for unethical behaviour is tantamount to a verdict that admits no appeal. It can permanently undermine a manager's business reputation and put an end to his career.
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