Essay Sample on Ethical Issues in the Workplace

Ethics works to enhance credibility and improve the decision-making process in workplace communication. This facilitates the building of trust between the two parties. Studies have shown that ethics provides a suitable groundwork for the right and wrong, thereby allowing the two parties to communicate with a foundational understanding of different expectations (Quintanilla & Wahl, 2017). The adoption of ethics, therefore, helps to avoid harm, and this is crucial in communication because it operates to build trust. Ethical issues in workplace communication can broadly involve the concealment or misrepresentation of information, use manipulative arguments or language, or presentation of other people's idea as your own (Shockley-Zalabak, 2014).

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

I believe that I have encountered a situation that involved ethical decision-making. As a manager, I had to take responsibility for my team for its failure to make a deadline out of the task that was assigned. The inability of my team to meet the deadline was attributed to the fact that I had failed to provide a managerial oversight role. As an ethical leader, I had to communicate to the concerned department to ensure that every department and employee understood whatever happened and some of the possible course of actions that were to be employed to resolve the problem.

In my view, self-concepts and perceptions have a significant influence on the communication choices. Fundamentally, our perceptions of ourselves influence our communications with other people and the content of our interpersonal communication (Quintanilla & Wahl, 2017). For example, the belief that we are always right, then by definition, will make us believe that someone else is wrong whenever they disagree with us. In the same way, if we think ourselves as tolerant of the differences, then will attempt to behave uncritically towards those unlike ourselves.

In my case, I learned that ethical communication in the workplace could help develop trust and honesty among employees in an organization or organizational department. Communication helped in improving the understanding of my team about the need for making the deadline and ensuring that all tasks are completed within the assigned period. There are vital factors that must be considered when composing communications. These include completeness, courtesy, concreteness, clarity, and conciseness (Quintanilla & Wahl, 2017; Pearson, 2017). A communication process that integrates all these elements is deemed to be ethical because it not only intended to meet the expected objectives but also works to improve the understanding of the parties about what is talked about.

References

Pearson, R. (2017). Business ethics as communication ethics: Public relations practice and the idea of dialogue. In Public relations theory (pp. 111-131). Routledge.

Quintanilla, K.M. & Wahl, S.T. (2017). Business and Professional Communication: KEYS for Workplace Excellence. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc

Shockley-Zalabak, P. (2014). Fundamentals of organizational communication. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

TED. (Producer). (2016). Adam Galinsky: How to speak up for yourself [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_galinsky_how_to_speak_up_for_yourself