Question: Analysis of how an individual reconciles personal, organizational, and cultural values, and ethics in a global setting.
An individual is messed up with many feelings and pressures. These feelings or pressures may be because of many reasons both in and out of their scope. Apart from all these, an individual should maintain a tight integration many aspects in their life and also should establish a proper value relation with day to day activities. A typical Individual is fully occupied with his personal, organizational and cultural aspects and there could be a strong chance of imbalance in assigning the available value set. A successful individual should maintain a close combination of his personal, organizational and cultural values and ethics to survive in a global setting.
Values of any individual can be further classified into two types and they are as below
Self driven values:
These values drive the human nature and are built by any individual for their own sake. These values are set by any individual to achieve their personal or organizational goal. These values are used by any individual to achieve and set their standards of life like gaining good knowledge in any aspect, wisdom and obtaining a comfortable life style in society.
Instrumental values:
Instrumental values are used as a mode to achieve the self driven values. Behavioral aspects that were shown daily by any individual acts as input for these instrumental values (Nonis and Swift). Instrumental values are mainly applied to teleological moral systems, where there is a lot of scope to understand the action to be taken in case of no choice.
Personal Values and Ethics
Any individual allocates highest priority to their personal values. These personal values guide the individuals to enhance their level of communication in the work place. These values are mainly related most personal aspects and exclusively belongs to a particular individual. Personal values are used by any individual to determine an appropriate action plan to achieve individual goals across multiple areas (Hyde & Weathington, 2006). Personal values may be similar to many individuals and the way they consider the usage makes it different from each other. These personal values decide the way any individual reacts to tough situations at their personal or work place. Accountability, the way any individual is responsible to their assigned tasks or work is the core attribute for building personal values. Any individual should be responsible enough to accept the output of their work, whether it is positive or negative. Building up this particular factor plays a significant role in evaluating the global settings. When ever there is a low accountability, most of the individuals start blaming the situations and work conditions and thus loosing their own moral levels.
The combination of these personal values and ethics helps in evaluating the behavior of any individual. Ethics in simple words can be defined as the capability of any individual to differentiate between what is good and what is bad. Ethics mainly determine the individual behavioral aspects and beliefs. Many factors like culture, religion and working habits will determine the ethical and moral levels of any human. There may be chances where the ethical values differ from individuals and can cause even clashes among individuals. Each and every culture has different mechanisms to interpret the ethics. Ethics to any human helps in development and understanding the working conditions and pressures. Ethics can reflect the sentimental and character levels of any culture. Personal values and ethics is a combination of good behavior and moral values. Following are few values that should be hold by any individual
- Accountability
- Challenge
- Commitment
- Coordination
- Accuracy
- Creativity
- Responsibility
- Discipline
- Efficiency
- Excellence
- Freedom
- Friendship
- Honesty
- Hard work
- Peace
- Love
- Loyalty
- Respect
- Stability
- Team work
- Trust
- Wisdom
Organizational values and Ethics
Once the individual is completely equipped with personal values, should consider organizational values. In many critical cases, individuals diffuse them selves and become disconnected to the organizational issues, in case of negative aspects. Many individuals don’t take responsibility in the failures of organization goals (Trevino and Nelson, 2005, p. 181). In many cases, there exists a case, where organizations blame individuals and individuals blame organizations in case of management diffusions. There could be many reasons behind this and the primary one is that the decision making is centralized task and every individual should rely on the same decision. In any organization there could be many hierarchical variance and physiological differences among different employees in the organization. Organization values mainly links with individual values in case of taking negative responsibility. In many case the individual decisions taken by any manger or employee may be overridden by group decisions and this definitely brings down the motivation levels of individuals.
Organization ethics is the way the company or organization conducts it operations based on its value driven style. Both employees and customers of the organization are affected by these ethics. Business ethics is a set of morals that were being followed at the workplace and action of prioritizing these values, such that they meet the expectations. In most of the case employees are responsible for maintaining the ethical values of the organization. Consider a case, where the employees are responsible for answering customer about their issues. In many situations, these employees are irresponsible to answer the customers and thus killing the ethics and values of the organization. The basic operations of any organization depend on these organizational ethics. On an average, every organization across the globe face these ethical and moral problems daily and always comes up with innovative solutions to meet these problems and proper decision making process is one of them. Every organization will set of values and ethics and insists the employees to follow them. Many organizations make the employees to sign on a document that hold all these ethics and values, before they join the organization.
Culture Values and Personal Ethics
Culture values make most of the world. Many individual from different parts of the world come together and work for any organization. Along with their skill set, these individuals also carry their traditions and culture. Individual values and their ethics are directly related to their cultural aspects. Culture values acts almost like mirrors to any individual behavior and personal ethics. There are many cases, where an individual carries multi-cultural values and this mainly happens when that particular individual is born and brought up in different areas of word and in front of different cultures. Family conditions and traditions also affect these culture values of an individual. Employees with multi-cultural values are considered and given highest priority, as they can work under any geographical conditions. There are many cases, these personal and cultural ethics clash with organizational ethics. These cultural values also play a very important role in many crucial decision making scenarios.
Integration of individual Personal, Organizational and Cultural Values and Ethics
To understand the importance of combination of personal, organizational and cultural values, let us consider a simple example of kid’s game. In many case, while kids are playing any game, the captains will select their mates based on their interest and never consider the skills in the game. Only outgoing persons are given high importance and individuals with low communication and outgoing skills are given least priority. To be selected and recognized in any group the individual should be outgoing and noted among the group, then only he or she gets some reorganization. Any individual should concentrate and build up their personal values and ethics, so that they are easily recognized in any group. That particular individual should be in a position to make the difference between good and bad and should consider the positive aspects to build a strong personal value wall around them and because of this; any one can be survived in tough social situations.
In many cases, these personal values are directly derived from the cultural and traditional values. Most of the personal values built by any individual always depend on their childhood conditions and values incorporated from their culture and parents. When ever a person respects his personal and cultural values, he always implements the same respect to the organizational values. Each and every organization always hires employees with high level of personal values and ethics and expects them to obey the predefined organizational values and ethics. Individual personal life and their previous work culture are always recorded by the organizations which are hiring them.
Conclusion
Everyday life any individual is a combination and implementation of their personal, organizational and cultural values. A proper ethical decision that helps the organization is always taken by proper alignment of personal ethics with organizational ethics and some part of cultural ethics. These values are mainly used to hire any employee in the organization. Every organization maintains a recorded set of their ethics and they are of no use, if they are not properly followed by individuals. Even in case of personal values, many of the individuals neglect the core idea in building the values and simply violate many things and become a dud. Any individual with a proper set of their own personal values and ethics, when works as per the organizational ethics by following few cultural ethics and morals, will always result in greater achievement both for themselves and for organization.