Abstract
Since few South African organisations have as yet appointed ethics officers, there is often a lack of clarity on who should take responsibility for coordinating organisations’ ethics management efforts. The purpose of this paper was to assess HR (the Human Resource function and its practitioners) as a possible contender to assume responsibility for ethics management in SA organisations. To this end a mail survey was conducted among registered HR practitioners (N=410). Two factors related to 1) the extent of HR’s ethics management competence and 2) HR’s responsibility for ethics management, were identified. The results showed that HR practitioners on average believe that they indeed have an ethics management competence and that they should be involved in ethics management. However, practitioners with a great deal of exposure to organisations that manage ethics believe to a lesser extent that they should be involved in ethics management. The implications of the findings are discussed.
Highlights
Since few South African organisations have as yet appointed ethics officers, there is often a lack of clarity on who should take responsibility for coordinating organisations’ ethics management efforts
It is concluded that both belief regarding the adequacy of ethics training during formal education and exposure to ethics management, seem to moderate belief regarding the ethics management competence of practitioners and the extent to which human resource function (HR) should be involved in ethics
The results of this survey have shown that, HR practitioners agree that they have an ethics management competence and that HR should be involved in ethics within an organisation, it is their belief about the adequacy of their formal training that moderates this and not their actual level of formal training
Summary
Since few South African organisations have as yet appointed ethics officers, there is often a lack of clarity on who should take responsibility for coordinating organisations’ ethics management efforts. Most South African organisations that decide to manage ethics proactively and want to establish in-house structures to achieve this, seem to prefer a somewhat tentative approach until such time as the viability of a full-blown ethics management function becomes imperative. These organisations allocate corporate ethics management responsibilities to existing corporate functions as over-and-above roles to be performed. Examples of such functions that can be given ethics management responsibilities are financial management, internal audit, compliance, corporate legal services, risk management, procurement, the company secretariat, or the human resource function (HR) and/or one or more of its affiliate functions (e.g. organisational development, employment relations or human resource development). Thereafter an empirically based survey of South African HR practitioners’ perspectives on their perceived role in assuming responsibility for managing ethics will be reported and discussed
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