Ethical Issues In The Workplace Essay

Managers of today’s businesses face many different issues that are drastically different from the working environment even just 20 years ago. The 21st century is full of many dilemmas that managers will face and continue to ensure as time goes on. With the rapid availability of personal electronics and social media, managers have many issues of ethics related to these two fields. This is genuinely unique 21st century issue and since they are still new, managers are still coming up with creative ways to combat the problems that they face related to personal electronics and social media in terms of information spillage.

The concept of ethics has existed for a long time and is roughly defined as a system of moral principles. These moral principles

As ethical issues arise, managers find a way to deal with them in the best interests of all parties involved or it goes beyond them to the courts. The right for employees to receive fair wages for work performed is considered a universal ethic right in today’s world. It is covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. In this act, companies are required to perform ethically by paying their employees fair wages for the work they performed. It also set the standard of a 40 hour work week as well how over time is paid as well. This concept of ethics was new at the time but now is considered the norm. It was a hard fought battle even in the courtroom considering that the Supreme Court even voided a law that imposed a minimum wage. Many company managers were already paying their employees what was considered fair wages at the

“Risk managers are struggling with a series of challenging balancing acts regarding the explosion of social media in the workplace. One is between giving workers freedom of expression and protecting company assets, including trade secrets and proprietary information.”(Greenwald, 2013, p.135). The risks involved are very serious depending on the industry that the employer is operating in. A major problem is the “potential release on social media of proprietary company information and trade secrets” (Greenwald, 2013, p.13). Managers that are trying to figure out the balance of what constitutes an employee’s free speech rights and what an employee may share that could be considered defamation by the employer. These postings by employees may not even be intentional. An example would be a high level employee whose company is merging with another. Simply posting something alluding to the location of a potential merger partner can signal people who the partner may be and how close the merger will happen due to the occurrence of face to face