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The Workplace –Today’s Challenges
Overview
(1) Privacy and organizational issues over private decisions.
(2) Moral issues and polygraphs, personality tests, employee monitoring, and workplace drug testing.
(3) Working conditions, safety, and management style.
(4) Job satisfaction and dissatisfaction and the prospects for enhancing the quality of work life.
Introduction
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, privacy is “the right to be let alone.”
The Court considers privacy to be one of the most comprehensive and valued rights of citizens. What moral issues arise in the workplace
regarding privacy? What are a company’s responsibilities
regarding employee privacy?
Organizational Influence in Private Lives Privacy is widely acknowledged to be a
fundamental right. Yet corporate behavior and policies often
threaten privacy, especially in the case of employees.
This can happen through the release or exchange of personal (or “privileged”) information about employees
It also occurs when imposing employer values upon employees.
Organizational Influence in Private Lives The importance of privacy – Our concern for
privacy has three aspects: (1) We want to control intimate or personal
information about ourselves and not permit it to be freely available to everyone.
(2) We don’t want our private selves to be on public display.
(3) We value being able to make certain personal decisions autonomously.
Organizational Influence in Private Lives There is no consensus among philosophers or
lawyers about the following: (a) How to define the concept of privacy. (b) How far to extend the right to privacy. (c) How to balance a concern for privacy against
other moral considerations. The burden is on the organization to establish
the legitimacy of encroaching on the personal sphere of the individual.
Organizational Influence in Private Lives Legitimate and illegitimate influence: A firm is
legitimately interested in whatever significantly influences work performance.
It has a legitimate interest in employee conduct off the job only if conduct affects work performance.
It is difficult to say precisely what constitutes a significant influence on job performance.
It is also difficult to spell out exactly when off-duty conduct truly affects company image.
Organizational Influence in Private Lives Issues of privacy interference in the
workplace:
(1) Legitimate and illegitimate influence.
(2) Involvement in civic activities.
(3) Participation in wellness programs.
Obtaining Information
Businesses often obtain information about their employees through testing and/or monitoring.
Informed consent: Its presence or absence is the main ethical issue in testing and monitoring – it implies deliberation and free choice.
Deliberation: Employees must be provided all key facts concerning the information gathering procedure and understand its consequences.
Free choice: The decision to participate must be voluntary and un-coerced.
Obtaining Information
Polygraph tests: Businesses cite several reasons for using the polygraph test:
(1) It is a fast and economical way to verify information provided by job applicants and screen candidates for employment.
(2) It allows employers to identify dishonest employees or job candidates.
(3) It eliminates the need for audits and oppressive controls, so may increase workers’ freedom.
Obtaining Information
Those who defend polygraphs rely on several assumptions that are open to question:
(1) Telling lies triggers an involuntary, distinctive response – but this is not always the case.
(2) Polygraphs are extraordinarily accurate – this has been disputed.
(3) Polygraphs cannot be beaten – they may catch the guilty but also generate false positives, wrongly identifying as liars those who told the truth.
Obtaining Information
Additional issues to consider in evaluating the use of polygraphs in the workplace:
(1) The information the organization seeks should be clearly and significantly related to the job.
(2) The grounds must be compelling enough to justify violating the individual’s privacy and freedom.
(3) The data gathering must be evaluated – the type of information being gathered, who will have access to it, and how it will be discarded.
Obtaining Information
Personality tests: One of the most popular, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, is used by eighty-nine of the Fortune 100 companies, and is taken by more than 2.5 million Americans every year.
Such tests help businesses both screen candidates and match individuals to appropriate jobs.
But they involve questionable psychological premises (that individuals fit into a small number of personality types), may invade privacy, and may reinforce conformity.
Obtaining Information
Monitoring employees on the job: This may be necessary, but it can be abused and can violate privacy.
Like testing, it often gathers personal information about workers without their informed consent.
Organizations frequently confuse notification of such practices with employee consent, but notification does not constitute consent.
Obtaining Information
Drug testing: Became an issue when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) began banning college football players from postseason bowl games based on their steroid test results.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association supported drug testing: Postal workers testing positive in a pre-employment test were 50 percent more likely to be fired, injured, disciplined, or absent than those testing negative.
Obtaining Information
Additional considerations regarding drug testing:
(1) Excessive media attention and political posturing can lead to extreme or unnecessary measures.
(2) Drugs differ, so one must carefully consider which drugs one is testing for, and why.
(3) Companies must determine how to respond appropriately to individuals who fail the test.
(4) Any warranted tests must be careful to respect the dignity and rights of the persons to be tested.
Working Conditions
Health and safety: The number of occupational hazards is awesome and generally unrecognized.
U.S. Census Bureau indicates that about five thousand workers are killed on the job each year.
The director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) says thirty-two workers are killed on the job each day, more than doubling the Census figure.
Working Conditions
Census Bureau statistics reveal that the rate of industrial injury has been declining since 1960.
But the absolute number of workers disabled at work every year is ever increasing – about 3.7 million men and women.
Job-related injuries and illnesses cost the nation $65 billion a year – $171 billion when indirect costs such as lost wages are included.
Working Conditions
Employers clearly have a moral obligation not to expose workers to needless risks or to negligently or recklessly endanger their lives or health.
Employers, however, are not morally responsible for all workplace accidents caused by coworkers’ negligence or failure to exercise due care.
In some circumstances or in certain occupations, an injured worker can reasonably be said to have voluntarily assumed the risk.
Working Conditions
Problems with voluntary assumption of risk: It presupposes informed consent, which requires the worker to have been fully informed of the danger and to have freely chosen to assume it.
Employees have a moral right to refuse dangerous work (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court).
Employers, in turn, have a moral obligation not to expose workers to needless risk.
Working Conditions
What causes accidents? Accidents don’t just happen, but often result from poor job practices and environments that fail to prioritize safety.
OSHA: With the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, regulation of working conditions passed from the states to the federal government.
The thrust of the act was to ensure safe and healthy working conditions and impose a duty on employers to provide those conditions.
Working Conditions
New health challenges: The scope of occupational hazard is greater than many people think.
The numbers harmed by work-related injuries and illness may be generally underestimated.
These include musculoskeletal disorders, shift work, fatigue, and stress.
OSHA’s enforcement of existing regulations has too often been lax.
Working Conditions
Management styles: Nothing affects environment more than management style and quality.
In The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor described two management styles: Theory X managers believe that workers dislike
work and try to avoid. Theory Y managers assume that employees
basically like work and view it as something natural and potentially enjoyable.
Working Conditions
Theory X managers coerce and bully workers into conformity with organizational objectives.
Theory Y managers believe that workers are motivated by pride and self-fulfillment as well as money and job security, not dodging responsibility but accepting it and even seeking it out.
Other management styles include Theory Z managers, who hold Japanese-style respect for workers.
Working Conditions
One management style eschews a traditionally masculine approach (hierarchical, aggressive, winner-take-all) in favor of one more congenial to women (personal, empathetic, and collaborative).
Managers who operate with rigid assumptions about human nature, or who devote themselves to infighting and political maneuvering, may damage employees’ interests and lose their respect.
Working Conditions
Day care and maternity leave: Women still bear the primary responsibility for child rearing.
So their increased participation in the paid workforce has led to a growing demand for maternity-leave policies and child-care services.
In its research of 168 countries, a Harvard School of Public Heath study found that more than 160 guarantee paid maternity leave, whereas the U.S. mandates only unpaid leave (except in California and Washington).
Working Conditions
Business and child care: Some argue that offering child care as a fringe benefit, and dealing flexibly with employees’ family needs, can prove advantageous for most employers.
Such policies can be cost-effective in the narrower sense – decreasing absenteeism, boosting morale and loyalty, enhancing productivity, and attracting new recruits.
Working Conditions
Three moral concerns:
(1) Women have a right to compete on equal terrain with men, and paid leave can reinforce that right.
(2) Development of potential capacities is a moral ideal, and perhaps a human right, so women should not be forced to choose between childbearing and pursuing careers.
(3) The work world often reproduces the traditional male-female division of labor within the family.
Redesigning Work
Dissatisfaction on the job: The Work in America report (1970) identified three chief sources of worker dissatisfaction:
(1) Industry’s preoccupation with quantity, not quality; rigid rules and regulations; and the monotonous repetition of small, fragmented tasks.
(2) Lack of opportunities to be one’s own boss.
Redesigning Work
Other sources of dissatisfaction: Studies since the 1970s have cited workers’ feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, and self-estrangement or depersonalization.
Factors affecting job satisfaction: Employees at all occupational levels value interesting work, enough support and information to accomplish the job, enough authority to carry out the work, good pay, the opportunity to develop special skills, job security, and a chance to see results of their work.
Redesigning Work
Importance of job satisfaction: The design of work materially affects the total well-being of workers. Example: Studies show that job satisfaction is
the strongest predictor of longevity. Therefore, work content and job satisfaction are
paramount moral concerns. Satisfied workers are also more productive. Business has an economic reason as well as a
moral obligation to improve work quality.
Redesigning Work
Quality of work life: For some firms, this means providing workers with less supervision and more autonomy.
For others, it means providing work opportunities to develop and refine skills.
For still others, it means providing for greater participation in the conception, design, and execution of their work – that is, with greater responsibility and a deeper sense of achievement.
