Substantive Ethics
I found this article by Mark S. Blodgett to be quite refreshing and informative in terms of the new perspectives being presented. In the article, the issue being presented is the differences between ethics and law within corporate programs. It is an interesting issue that not many seem to think about when mentioning business rules and regulations. Moreover, ethics and law are typically viewed as two completely separate things, but the author digresses. Blodgett believes that in order to better integrate ethical codes and legal terms into a corporation, both entities should be viewed as one and the same. This is a fair point because as mentioned in the article, ethical codes are used by more than 90% of companies today, yet law has not really sunken into businesses as much as it should. Also, as mentioned in the text, legal obligations can be easily ignored by business executives simply because they are ignorant of the laws that are proposed. This is another huge factor as to why laws and ethics should be two sides of the same coin and not be viewed as differences.
It must be mentioned that I do agree with the author and what the articles findings suggested. Both legal and ethical approaches should be taken when considering corporations and businesses in order to integrate a more fluent and accommodable environment. Additionally, I can imagine this study was a long and difficult one as over twenty different compliance areas were assessed in order to compile an accurate study. Not only that, the term frequencies needed to be operationally defined correctly which is no easy feat.
Overall, I feel this study is a very helpful and useful one not only for corporate business, but for anyone in the workplace. Legal obligations must be enforced but at the same time ethical codes must be placed so that businesses may prosper in a healthy way.
Justice at the Millennium
This article by Colquitt et al. was very interesting and insightful on the topic of justice and fairness. Before reading this study, I did not even consider what defines justice or how fairness is accounted for. The authors are correct when stating that we only judge something as just based on past research and experiences and I found this quite interesting. Furthermore, the authors found research studies dating back to 1975 up to the date of publication in order to see just how much things have changed in terms of the workplace. When considering this, it was a great choice to conduct this study as a meta-analysis to see the key differences between older definitions of justice, and a modern take on the concept. Between all this time, lots of rules and regulations have been implemented into what defines justice and more specifically, into the workplace. This study mainly focuses on how justice today plays a role in an organizational point of view rather than a courtroom, which can relate to a lot more people. Rightfully so, the researchers proposed three important questions to take into consideration when analyzing all the different types of articles over the years.
Personally, I believe this meta-analysis is very important for anyone in the workplace because the questions posed by the researchers are prominent issues in today’s society. For instance, an employee may have more than one boss and those bosses may define fairness in differing ways. A study like this may help both bosses come to a happy medium and decide on whatever the employee has done as fair or not. Even more so, thousands of new individuals are entering the workforce every month and with increasing demand for jobs comes new accommodations for what defines as just. Again, I cannot stress enough how important this study is to those already in the workplace or to those who are looking to make a change into any work environment.
