Abstract:Employee-employee conflicts are common occasions for managerial intervention. In judging such disputes, managers bring to encounters a frame that is not conducive to employee due process. Making managers aware of their legal responsibilities in resolving employee disputes is a poor substitute for managers’ understanding and implementation of their ethical due process obligations. Moreover, moral imagination is necessary in order to counter the effects of the managerial frame that employees are either not worthy of due process protections or that such protections (...) are not a priority. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the perceived ethical issues and roles of employment managers based on their responses to a recent "Ethical Issues in Human Resource Management Survey." This research addresses five major questions including: 1) Whether employment managers' perceptions of the factors influencing unethical behavior vary according to gender, job position, and company size, 2) What are the perceived frequency and seriousness of misconduct among HR functional areas, 3) Whether groups of employment managers (i.e., males and females) vary significantly in their (...) perceptions of the seriousness of unethical events, 4) Whether gender and organizational level influence how often particular ethics roles are played, and 5) What particular roles are being played by employment managers as they respond to ethical dilemmas. The findings show that regardless of gender, position, or company size, employment managers' ethical behavior is influenced most by the behavior of senior managers and their immediate supervisors. In addition, the respondents believe that ethical misconduct occurs more often and is most serious in specialties such as employment, health, safety, and security, and compensation. Gender, industrial category, and company size have a significant impact on how serious unethical practices were perceived to be. Finally, seven of the eight ethics roles were matched with the ethical dilemmas submitted by the survey respondents. (shrink)