Managing Organisational Ethics: Professionalism, Duty and HR Practitioners

After almost 20 years of researching, teaching and consulting in business and organisational ethics, this emerging field seems to be facing an organisational dilemma. Who should manage the ethics and integrity systems that are slowly being adopted by Australian firms?During consulting engagements with numerous Australian businesses it has become clear that the task of managing ethics and integrity systems, i.e. creation of codes of ethics, ethics committees, information programs, conducting of audits, etc, more often than not seems to be delegated to Human Resources Managers and their Departments. This trend appears to be unique to the Australian setting and contrary to the US where Ethics Officers and Compliance Officers assume this role.The purpose of this paper is to consider the question of who is appropriate to manage the ethics function in the Australian context. A literature review will examine the concept of professionalism and what characteristics and duties qualifies an occupation as a profession. In particular it will identify the role of knowledge and the existence of an organisation or association that regulates and licences the individual to operate as a professional. It will then identify the roles, responsibilities and characteristics of ethics officers so as to determine the knowledge required to undertake this task in an organisation setting.Given the predisposition to delegate this function to Human Resources practitioners in Australian Organisations, a review of formal Postgraduate Human Resources programs at the major Australian Universities will be undertaken. The objective of this task is to determine whether such programs contain any specific ethics content, in particular the creation of codes of ethics, codes of conduct, ethics training and the conducting of ethics audits. This will establish whether Australian Human Resource professions are sufficiently equipped with the knowledge and capabilities required to undertake this function through their formal education.