Explain how Ethical Climate is promoted in organizations through examples.

There are highly ethical organizations, examples of some of which are given below:

1. Marilyn Hamilton, founded Quickie Designs in 1980, who was a teacher and athlete who was paralyzed in  hang-gliding  accident.  A highly mobile  and  versatile  wheel  chair  was designed weighing 26 pounds, half the weight of chairs that were currently produced. The company grew up within a decade  to $65 millions  in sales.  It had  a policy of customer sponsored sports events for young people in wheelchairs. It is relatively small (500 strong) and exceptionally committed.

2. Martin Mariette  Corpn began an ethics program  in 1985  emphasizing  basic  value  like honesty  and  fairness  and  responsibility  for  environment  and  high  product  quality.  They drafted a code of conduct, conducted and ethics workshop for managers and created effective procedures for employees to express their ethical concerns.

3. Texas Instruments (TI) is an example of an ethical large corporation emphasizing on trust, respect for other persons, etc. TI appointed a full time Ethics Director, Carl Skooglund. He surveyed  to  know  the ethical  concerns  of employees  and  their  awareness.  He  conducted workshops  on  ethics,  wrote  brochures  and  was  directly  to  all  employees   through  a confidential phone line. Even though they made it clear that unprofessional conduct would not be tolerated, the focus was on supporting ethical conduct than punishing wrong doers.

4.  A  large  defense  contractor  started  an ethics  program  that  was  not  successful.  Higher management viewed the program as a success but the professional employees considered it as a sham/farce for public relations and window dressing. The primary

difficulty  was  the  gap  between  the  intentions  of  top  management  and  the  unchanged behavior of the Senior managers.