Cultural Values And Personal Ethics

Decisions we make everyday are influenced in part by our core values. Our cultural background, individual bias, personal ethics, and past experiences help to form the basis of our value system. "We begin sharpening our values at a very early age. Our parents, teachers, friends, religious leaders, heroes and fictional idols teach us right from wrong" (Deblieux, 1995). These teachings help us to evaluate situations and form conclusions.

We are all individuals, but together we form a society. "Each society develops a different set of assumptions and norms under which to operate, and different professions, functions, and even genders within a society or organization can have different cultures themselves" (Raatikainen, 2002). This holds true for different generations within a society or organization as well.

As we bring our individualism together to form a group, we must recognize the differences within each member. We must overcome any prejudgments formed by past experiences. "We tend to prejudge others in our mind then merely reinforce these prejudices with information we gather. We need to train ourselves to reverse this process. Instead, we must gather the information that disproves our prejudice to overcome the self-fulfilling prophesy inherent in our prejudicial stereotypes. That is we must be ready to make a concerted effort to prove our prejudices and stereotypes are wrongs as a result of the information we gather about people" (Buhler, 1993).

Prejudgment, or bias, can alienate individual members of the group thus preventing active participation by all. Some members may feel reluctant to bring ideas to the table. Feelings of resentment towards other members can start to develop. Conflict may eve...

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... We need to embrace our differences and not let bias, or prejudgment influence our decisions.

References

Buhler, P. (1993, July). Understanding cultural diversity and its benefits, 54(7) p. 17. Retrieved on June 3, 2005, from EBSCOhost database.

Deblieux, M. (1995, November). Workplace Ethics: Why be concerned? HRFocus. Retrieved on June 3, 2005, from EBSCOhost database.

DiPiazza, S.A. (2003, January). It's all down to personal values. Global Agenda, 1 (p.116). Retrieved on June 3, 2005, from EBSCOhost database.

Raatikainen, P. (2002). Contributions of multiculturalism to the competive advantage of an organization, Singapore Management Review. Retrieved on June 3, 2005, from EBSCOhost database.

Tinkler, H. (2004, November). Ethics in business: The heart of the matter. Vital Speeches of the Day. Retrieved on June 3, 2005, from EBSCOhost database.