How Organizations Can Improve Ethical Decision-Making

How Organizations Can Improve Ethical Decision-Making

There is no definite procedure or method that an organization can adopt for making ethically correct decisions. Although hunches or intuitions are important, an organization cannot rely on these factors for ethical decision making. Fair and good ethical decision making involves clear understanding of the facts of the situation as well as considering the moral principles relevant to a given situation.

The organization must first recognize the moral dimension of the problem. Then there is a need to carefully identify all the parties at stake (those who are going to be affected by the decision) and their interrelationships. In order to be able to make good ethical decisions, an organization must be sensitive to the moral values involved. At times, due to the technical nature of a problem, the organization might fail to recognize the moral dimension of the problem. In such a situation, the morally best course of action by the organization should also consider the economic and technical aspects.

In order to be able to make good ethical decisions, the organization must quantify and compare all the benefits (such as fairness, emotional satisfaction, financial benefit, social upliftment) and burdens (such as emotional pain, financial loses, harm to the society). The organization must look for related or similar cases and find out what course of action was taken in that case, how the decision affected the stakeholders. Discussions involving stake holders is important in the decision making processes. The organization must ascertain whether the decision taken is in conformity with legal provisions and organizational policies.

These processes and methods are how organizations can improve ethical decision making.