After watching these videos I would like to use the example of my yearly
evaluation at work as a testimony of my directors ethical leadership. I have been working with my boss for the last
6 years. It is only the two of us in the
office but over the years she has proven to be a very fair and ethical leader. I great example is my yearly evaluation. Every year, our bosses have to evaluate our
performance. Every year she has been
very fair in her grading and also has allowed me to be participatory in the evaluation
process.
For example, this year has been a very challenging year for me. I separated and consequently became divorced,
had to move out of my home, live temporarily with my mother and basically start
from scratch. This life changing even
affected my performance at work and my performance declined. During our evaluation she brought up her
dissatisfaction with my job performance and gave me an opportunity to defend
myself. We discussed my personal life
and challenges and she was very understanding. Based on the explanation, she decided to
modify the current evaluation and increase my points since she was able to
discern that my situation was unique. I
think a clear example of her ability to exert what I would deem ethical
intelligence was that she was willing and able to change her opinion and rating
of my performance after discussing the issues with me. She did not penalize me harshly just based on
my performance but factored the challenges I had faced. Weinstein pointed out some important ethical
practices one being the ability to give criticism (Weinstein, 2012). My director provided me with constructive
criticism in a way that was productive and compassionate. She was empathetic with my case and was able
to communicate her criticism to me in a way that was ethical. Weinstein describes five ethical principles
which are: Do no harm, make things better, respect others, be fair, and be
loving (Weinstein, 2011). I believe that my director demonstrates these
principles in her treatment of her employees and colleagues. She does not have a hidden agenda and has a
loyal sense to the organization as well as her peers. This behavior is evident through her actions
on a daily basis. I in turn also behaved correctly through ethical intelligent
apologies. I understood her criticism
and did not take it personally. I was
able to divulge the information and understand that her ultimate goal was to
help me to improve and be an effective and efficient employee. Through my understanding of ethics and moral
behavior I was able to understand the ultimate motivation for her criticism
which was to help me.
Gallagher describes different degrees of unethical behavior in the
workplace (Gallagher, 2013). It’s difficult to gauge certain behaviors and
decide whether or not it actually is ethical or not. One example of an unethical behavior that was
observed at my job was regarding the purchase of some office equipment. One of our old directors supposedly purchased
a modem for our office. Yet, the receipt
that he turned in was obviously a bogus hand-written receipt. The modem also came to us in a bag and not a
box. He claimed that he had gotten the
floor model. My boss and I suspected that he had brought in a used modem from
his house that he wasn’t using and then hand-wrote a receipt and kept the money
for himself. We never blew the whistle
on him because he volunteered so much of his own time in troubleshooting many
of our IT hardware issues. Neither my
director nor I understand much about computer hardware so he was always the one
installing and fixing things and making sure your office ran well. He also
bought things out of his own pocket (cords, wires, and other supplies) that
were needed for installation. We decided
that overall, he had ethically contributed to making sure we were able to run
our office and therefore we could not condemn him for such a small issue such
as falsifying a receipt. The bottom line
was that he had saved our office a lot of money by fixing things his self.
All in all, although our office is
small, I believe in some way, we have all contributed to what is called an Ethically
Intelligent Organization. This is
described as “ the collective capacity of an
organization’s employees to gauge the fit between the
organization and its external environment” (O’Donohue & Wickham, 2010, p. 5).
I believe that at my campus we have collectively been able to create an ethical
atmosphere that we all adhere to and apply these principles to how we conduct
our business with each other and our students.
References
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