The Lack of Training and the Unethical Behavior

-The Lack of Training and the Unethical Behavior

In public administration, the main and the largest goal is to create public value in a form of transparency and trust between the public servants and the citizens. In order to achieve this targeted value, public administrator shall maintain ethical conduct throughout his decision-making and performance. Therefore, public officials are expected to develop reliable ethical competence. Understanding or judging ethics problems is a matter of subjective preference. Even if the organization has codes of ethics, integrity standards will remain limited. Moreover, forcing codes of ethics may lead to another problem, which is the agentic shift and “willful obedience” when an official repudiates reasoning alternatives solutions. Total compliance prevents public officials from developing their “judgment skills” necessary for resolving complex or new problems. (Whitton 2009, 240) Thus, developing ethical competence does not rely on the limited codes of ethics, but on training public officials to improve applicable knowledge and skills through training.

Public officials training and development program methodology depends on completing the six components and skills of ethical competence. First, public official should improve problem identification skills. This set of skills can be described as the notion of ethical sensitivity. This notion assists public official in applying relevant standards to the problematic situation and test assumptions in case of uncovered issues by the organization’s rules. Second, problem-solving skills are important for public officials as it support the task or resolving critical disputes as part of their job. These skills include building capacity to differentiate...

... middle of paper ...

...ability to make the right decision at the right time. Furthermore, public officials should be clever enough to understand when to confront or comply with the power of culture and society. The qualities of public officials must be supportive of democratic public, organizational structure, and organizational culture and build them on a good relation with the social norms (Cooper 2012, 192) and consider redundancy management in decision-making process.

In conclusion, the problem of unethical or corrupt behavior caused by not only the lack of training of public administrators or by inherent pressures in representative democracy as practiced in the United States. These powerful pressures can be political pressures in both forms, Federal and local pressure and can be in different forms such as the organizational interest, the public interest, and the self-interest.