Cultural Values And Personal Ethics

Running head: CULTURAL VALUES AND PERSONAL ETHICS

Effect of Cultural Values and Personal Ethics

Anne E. Bonidie

University of Phoenix

Effect of Cultural Values and Personal Ethics

Decisions we make everyday are influenced in part by our core values. Our cultural background, individual bias, personal ethics, and past experiences help to form the basis of our value system. "We begin sharpening our values at a very early age. Our parents, teachers, friends, religious leaders, heroes and fictional idols teach us right from wrong" (Deblieux, 1995). These teachings help us to evaluate situations and form conclusions.

We are all individuals, but together we form a society. "Each society develops a different set of assumptions and norms under which to operate, and different professions, functions, and even genders within a society or organization can have different cultures themselves" (Raatikainen, 2002). This holds true for different generations within a society or organization as well.

As we bring our individualism together to form a group, we must recognize the differences within each member. We must overcome any prejudgments formed by past experiences. "We tend to prejudge others in our mind then merely reinforce these prejudices with information we gather. We need to train ourselves to reverse this process. Instead, we must gather the information that disproves our prejudice to overcome the self-fulfilling prophesy inherent in our prejudicial stereotypes. That is we must be ready to make a concerted effort to prove our prejudices and stereotypes are wrongs as a result of the information we gather about people" (Buhler, 1993).

Prejudgment, or bias, can alienate individual members of the group thus preventing active participation by all. Some members may feel reluctant to bring ideas to the table. Feelings of resentment towards other members can start to develop. Conflict may eventually arise. "It is important to take into account the entire person - not just their cultural background. People from the same culture are individuals and unique. Stereotyping and prejudice causes us to lump everyone from a particular culture together. This fosters the 'we-they' syndrome that is so dangerous" (Buhler, 1993).

The establishment of ground rules, or basic principles, can help to minimize any negative impacts of creating a diverse workgroup. The formalizing of the corporate value system can prove to be difficult. Each person has his own idea, based upon his own experiences of what should be included in this collective value set. This means that everyone does not see things in the same light. What I consider to be the norm, may not be the same as what others perceive as the norm.

Our values system is what we rely on to make our decisions in life and business. This holds true in a group setting as well. But, what if our background was not the most ethical? Each person has a different view of what is considered ethical; and, there are varying degrees of what is considered ethical. We all can agree that robbing a bank is unethical. I am not sure we all can agree that taking home office supplies from work for personal use is considered unethical. "An ethical person deals with other people fairly, openly and by the rules" (Deblieux, 1995).

Let us examine what could happen when companies, or individuals, experience ethical lapses. "Worldwide, corporate integrity is subject to investor doubt, employee anxiety and new legislation and regulation. It has become clear that the foundation or corporate integrity is personal integrity. News reports have repeatedly shown us that the individual failures of integrity can be a source of vast corporate deceptions. And the integrity of corporate reporting to the public has become a focus of sustained concern" (DiPiazza, 2003)

Second Chance Body, "produce bulletproof vests for police officers. It seems this company produced some potentially defective vests, but the initial quality control report was suppressed so it wouldn't hurt the company's