Jon Cowan/Courtesy Naked Good Galley
Summary.
People don’t enter the workforce with a fixed moral character. Just as employees can nurture (or neglect) their skills and abilities over time, they can learn to be more or less ethical. Yet rather than take a long-term view of employees’ moral development, many organizations treat ethics training as a onetime event, often limiting it to the onboarding process. If they do address ethics thereafter, it may be only by espousing codes of conduct or establishing whistleblower hotlines. Such steps may curb specific unethical actions, but they don’t necessarily help employees develop as moral people.