Ethics Newsline®

Survey finds little meaningful change in corporate behavior in post-Enron America; teens questioned say it is often acceptable to cheat, plagiarize, or use violence; new AP/Yahoo poll says voters put highest value on ethics and honesty — but don’t rate party frontrunners particularly highly in those categories.

NEW YORK
Three recent surveys take an interesting slant on ethics in the United States:

• Six years after a series of high-profile scandals rocked the business landscape, there has been little if any meaningful reduction in the risk of unethical behavior in corporate America, claims the Ethics Resource Center’s 2007 National Business Ethics Survey. Interviews with about 2,000 employees at a variety of U.S. companies shows many of them witness misconduct on the job, but tend not to report it, with overall results showing little improvement since pre-Enron days. In the past year, more than half of the employees surveyed said they had personally witnessed violations of company ethics codes, policies, or the law. More than two in five of the employees who witnessed such behavior did not report it.
• A significant number of U.S. teens say that dishonest and sometimes even violent behavior is necessary for success, according to the fifth annual Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey. While 71 percent of the teens polled say they feel fully prepared to make ethical decisions when they enter the workplace, 28 percent of that group say they believe it is sometimes necessary to cheat or plagiarize in order to succeed. Twenty-four percent said cheating on a test is sometimes acceptable, usually citing their personal desire to succeed as the rationale. Twenty-three percent of surveyed teens said that violence against another person is sometimes acceptable. Justifications included settling an argument (27 percent) and revenge (20 percent). The survey was conducted in September among 725 13-to-18-year-olds.
• Ethics and honesty rate as “very important” or “extremely important” qualities in a presidential candidate, according to a recent survey by the Associated Press and Yahoo News. Those traits, in fact, led the list of important qualities cited by those polled. But neither major party’s frontrunner, the Democrats’ Hillary Clinton or the Republicans’ Rudolph Giuliani, scored particularly high in those categories. Thirty-eight percent of respondents viewed Clinton as honest, and 40 percent as ethical; 42 percent described Giuliani as honest, and 40 percent characterized him as ethical.

Editor’s Note: Deloitte is a corporate sponsor of Ethics Newsline®.

Sources: Deloitte.com, Dec. 5 — AP, Dec. 5.