Ethical Issues in Human Resources 1. Ethical issues in Employment. 2. Ethical issues in HR Development. 3.

Ethical issues in Wage & Salary administration.

Employment: Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. HR Development: Human Resource Development (HRD) is the framework for helping employees develop their personal and organizational skills, knowledge, and abilities. Wages & salary administration: wage and salary admin is the group of activities involved in the development, implementation and maintenance of a pay system.

Ethical Issues in Employment: Job Design: To achieve the organizational goals, the activities which are
needed to be done in an order and which requires the use of techniques and organizational analysis.

Human Resource Planning: In words of E.W., a process by which an

organization should move from its current manpower position to its desired manpower position. Through planning, management strives to have the right number and right kind of people of the right places of the right time, doing things which results in both the organization and the individual receiving maximum long-run benefit.

Recruitment and Selection: By, Edwin B. Flippo, the process of

searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization. Choosing the most appropriate candidates and offering them jobs is called as Selection.

Ethics in Job Design:

1. Work Simplification (Work is over-simplified) 2. Job Rotation (movement of an employee from one job to the another) 3. Job Enlargement (horizontal loading of the job) 4. Job Enrichment (vertical loading of the job) 5. Autonomous work teams (involves employees in decision making) 6. High Performance work teams (provides complete freedom to workers) 7. Empowerment (delegating authority, providing skills to carry out higher level jobs) 8. De-jobbing (environment results in flexible job design)

Ethical Issues in Human Resource development:

Performance Appraisal: The process of performance appraisal helps the employees and the management to know the level of employees performance compared to the standard/pre-determined level. Training and Development: Training is the art of increasing the knowledge and skill of an employee doing a particular job. It is defined as the organized procedure by which people learn knowledge and/or skill for a definite purpose.

Career planning & Development: Process by which one selects career goals and path to achieve the goals. Career planning and development of employees are the responsibilities of both individual employee and management. Discharging ones own responsibility amounts to ethical act. Similarly, shirking from ones own responsibility is deemed as unethical.
Promotion: Promotion is the upward reassignment of an individual in an organizations hierarchy, accompanied by increased responsibilities, enhanced status and usually with increased income though not always.

Contd.

Employee Turnover: Employee retention rate should high

because traditionally, business used to believe that the employee stability with one organization, enhances his skills and organization gets the advantage of employee loyalty and commitment. Further, organizations preferred employee stability with them as they invested lot of money on employee training and development. When technologies, systems and structures have been changing at a faster rate, employees prefer to join the fast growing organizations, learn the latest technologies and managerial practices. These shifts helps the employees to add to the knowledge, skills and value to their existing human resources. The HR strategies to retain the employees for longer periods cannot be viewed as ethical.

Ethical Issues in Wage and Salary Administration:

The features of the wage/salary policies include: minimization of wage/salary inequalities, reduction of the gap between the highest and the lowest wage, payment of the equal wage/salary to all the employees doing the same job irrespective of their hob performance. The payment of Bonus Act 1965 insists for the payment of a minimum bonus at the rate of 8.33 percent of the annual basic pay of the employee irrespective of profit or loss of the company. A number of questions arise regarding the ethical issues in wage/salary/bonus payment which include: Is it ethical to pay the same wage/salary to an employee who makes the least contribution and to another employee who makes the highest and significant contribution to the job? Another question is: is it ethical to legally force a loss-making company to pay 8.33 percent bonus? Is it also ethical to pay bonus equally to all employees without considering their contributions? These issues seems to be unethical from the larger interest of the survival and development of the company and from the interest of the employees contributing significantly.