Organizational justice

The April 2010 issue of Risk Management has a great article titled: Finding and Fixing Corporate Misconduct. After noting reports that misconduct had declined during 2009, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) says the following.

According to the results from more than 300,000 employees in over 75 countries, this “decline” in misconduct during 2009 is actually misleading, as it pertains to less severe and risky behaviors such as the misuse of company resources or other ‘inappropriate behavior.’

In other words, no matter what you may have heard, there’s pretty good evidence that more serious forms of misconduct actually increased last year. What can you do about it?

The CEB says that you want to create a “culture of integrity.” And the most important thing to count on is what they call “Organizational Justice.” Basically, it’s the perception among employees that you mean business about your standards and rules.

The CEB suggests three steps for creating an atmosphere of organizational justice. Here they are with my idea of what that means in an everyday, practical sense.

(1) Equip managers to decisively deal with unethical behavior.

Equipping managers means giving them the tools to hire smart, including a background check for any position of trust and pre-employment […]