Most business organizational cultures are driven, in large part, by the character and temperament of the senior leader. So when the nightly news reports that another company has been spying on their employees – sometimes with and sometimes without the employees’ knowledge or consent – is the public surprised? Or is this the accepted norm in today’s business world? Surveillance in most industries is on the upswing. There are several reasons, including the huge growth in two sectors with theft and security problems – services and information technology, respectively. It is also worth noting that organizations differ in their culture on employee surveillance and that some of these differences are due to the type of business being conducted.
Assignment: Complete both parts A and B as a single, properly formatted paper. Submit as one document.
A. Consider the following surveillance actions, and decide for each whether it would never be ethical (mark with a N), would sometimes be ethical (mark with S), or would always be ethical (mark with A). For those that you mark with an S, indicate on what factors your judgement would depend.
1. Sifting through an employee’s trash for evidence of wrongdoing.
2. Periodically reading e-mail messages for disclosure of confidential information or inappropriate use.
3. Conducting video surveillance at work.
4. Monitoring web sites visited by employees when not at work, including private postings to Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, etc… and determining the appropriateness or not of those postings.
5. Monitoring a person’s faith and religious practices.
6. Taping phone conversations.
7. Posing as a job candidate, an investor, or a customer (when the real purpose is to solicit information from the employee).
B. Write a 750-1000 word essay answering the following: You have been working for an organization for a few years and you are in position to be promoted to a position of leadership. You have recently discovered that your company has been engaging in surveillance of employees without their knowledge and consent. Given your readings on leadership character, why it matters, and its influence on organizational culture, would you be less likely to continue working for (or consider a promotion from) the leader or employer that engaged in these methods? Why or why not? As a future leader of this or another organization, which character traits speak directly to you about how you would lead? In this essay, be sure to draw on both journal articles assigned this week, as well as on the Kouzes & Posner text.
