YOUNGSTOWN Professor touts the importance of workplace ethics

Even janitorial crews can benefit from ethics training, the speaker said.
By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- What makes good people do unethical, dishonest things in the workplace?
Ethics professor and author Patricia Werhane tried to get to the bottom of that question as keynote speaker at a workplace ethics seminar Friday at Youngstown State University.
Werhane, a professor of business ethics at the University of Virginia, said it took a widespread cheating scandal to awaken that institution to the need for ethics education. Proud of its reputation for integrity, the university community was devastated when word of a cheating scam involving 45 students became public last year.
That scandal birthed a campuswide effort to make ethics a priority among students and staff, said Werhane. She accepted leadership for the project but eventually recruited others to share the work.
"Ethics has to go all the way through the organization, even to the people who come in and clean at night," she said. "They see the stuff you leave out on your desk. They can get into your computer. Everybody, on every level, has to be committed to integrity.
About 150 people representing local businesses, schools, health and public service agencies attended the workplace ethics event sponsored by Humility of Mary Health Partners, the Dr. James Dale Ethics Center at YSU and Comprehensive Strategy/Mahoning County. It was part of a series of activities focusing attention on the importance of character traits in the Valley's homes, schools and workplaces.
Absence of programs
Without ethics education programs, Werhane said, workers and managers alike tend to form attitudes that can lead to dishonesty in the workplace and, in some cases, to corporate scandals such as those at WorldCom and Enron, Werhane said.
For example, she said, people excuse unethical behavior at work by labeling business "a game," by claiming that everybody's doing it or by minimizing the act. "It's just a little bit wrong. They're just taking one pencil, one five-minute call to mother in Alaska," she said.
Others do as they're told, and do it well, never examining the ethics of the work they're expected to perform.
Adolf Eichmann was that kind of worker, she said. He was efficient and kept meticulous records of the thousands of Jewish people he transported to the death camps during World War II. Later, when he was charged with war crimes, his only excuse was that he'd done his job perfectly.
Asked about frequent reports of ethical scandals around the country involving college and high school athletes, she said change is needed.
"Alumni must be committed to losing some games," she said. "As long as we think of them as athletes first, we're going to have problems. We have to think of them as students first, then athletes. We have a moral obligation to do that because 90 percent of student athletes never make it to the pros."
vinarsky@vindy.com