Ethical Considerations and Professional Practices in the Workplace

This essay delves into ethical considerations and professional practices within organizations, emphasizing the critical role of confidentiality. It defines ethical considerations as standards guiding recommended behaviors and professional practices as the conduct of trained professionals. The essay highlights the benefits of maintaining confidentiality, such as fostering trust among employees, employers, and customers, and explores the roles of human resource managers, employees, and top management in upholding confidentiality. It details various methods for maintaining confidentiality, including establishing rules, creating awareness, investing in secure equipment, and professional disposal of information. The conclusion stresses the importance of organizational rules, penalties for violations, and accountability to ensure ethical conduct and fair competition. The essay references several academic sources to support its claims, underscoring the significance of ethical behavior in the workplace.

Running head: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND PROFESIONAL PRACTICES 1
Ethical considerations and professional practices
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Ethical considerations and professional practices 2
Every institution is governed by rules and regulations that must be respected by all employees.
Violation of the organizational rules and regulations attracts different penalties depending on the
severity of the rules and regulations that are broken (Congress, 2017). To ensure the rules and
regulations of an organization are upheld, all employees are supposed to uphold on the basic
standards of conduct among their colleagues and the potential customers of the organization.
Ethical considerations refer to standards that spells out which behaviors are recommended and
those that are not recommended in an organization. Professional practices are the manners that
are upheld by individuals who have undergone intensive training in their field of profession.
Confidentiality is defined as rules that limits the sharing of organizational or customer’s sensitive
information to unwanted third party individuals. According to Spielthenner, (2015), revealing of
crucial information by organizational employees to undesired parties may attract penalties that
may cost even their job positions in the organization.
Ethics considerations are mainly associated with the human values that are possessed by
individuals e.g. integrity and respect (Ljungblom, & Lennerfors, 2018). In professional practices,
not all the activities that are done requires ethical behaviors instead, there are practices that are
done against the standard ethics to fulfil a given objective. In a professional context, ethics
application is stipulated under an agreement that outlines accepted behaviors and conducts that
individuals must adhere to while in line of their work stations or their professions. There are
many benefits that are associated with maintaining the confidentiality of an organization while
on duty. A highly maintained confidentiality in an organization plays a major role of boosting
trusts, openness and honesty among employers, employees and potential customers of an
organization (Ogbari et al., 2016). The built trust in an organization enables employees to work
perfectly without fear, and on the part of customers, confidentiality boosts the retention capacity
and attraction of new customers. Failure to maintain trust in an organization significantly reduces
the level of trust that employees and customers have towards the organizational management
team.
In an organization, there are different individuals who have the roles of maintaining the
organization confidentiality (Downe, Cowell, & Morgan, 2016). These people include: Human
resource managers, the overall employee and the top management team. The human resource
managers of an organization are individual who are mainly given the mandate of maintaining

Ethical considerations and professional practices 3
confidentiality of information relating to the organizational employees and other stakeholders.
These professionals have the mandate of devising strategies that are meant to protect the privacy
of the organizations especially employee privacy. Employee privacy requires that the human
resource team to keep relevant information of employees relating employee medical records,
remunerations to as confidential as possible. Stored files containing private information of
employees and the company must be kept in a way that the information will not be miss used or
leak to unwanted people who might in turn compromise the organization’s normal operations.
Failure by these professionals to maintain the privacy of employees, concerned employees may
file cases against the company when they are convinced that their personal data has leaked to
undesired people in the organization or outside the organization. Cases relating to accusation of
revealing the privacy of the employees or the company at large may make an organization to
have a negative reputation in its competitive markets. This will give the organization competitors
an added advantage of outdoing the organization due to the negative reputation (MacLean,
Litzky, & Holderness, 2015). This scenario clearly illustrates the essence of keeping the
organization and employee details and information in a private mode.
The other important group that should enhance confidentiality of an organization are the overall
workforce of the organization. Organizational workforce is charged with maintaining the
organizational privacy avoiding to share information of the organization to third parties.
Employees must only access the permitted files in their respective departments. Sharing of
organization or departmental information to third parties should only be done with the consent of
the departmental heads or supervisors. Employees should uphold integrity in their work area by
ceasing from sharing their personal information like salaries to their fellow employees. prevents
unnecessary conflicts that may arise as a result of revealing private information to fellow
employees. Employees also should not share organizational business dealings with clients and
competitors of the organization in order to maintain a healthy competition with their fellow
competitors. According to International Taskforce on Assessment Center Guidelines, (2015), if
by any chance employees are found to leak sensitive information to outsiders, then the employee
believed to have violated the laws of the organization by breaching the confidentiality and they
must face disciplinary actions. The top management team also have the role of maintaining the
organizational confidentiality during their normal activities in the organizations. They must

Ethical considerations and professional practices 4
ensure that the very sensitive information relating to the markets and their returns are only shared
by only the relevant stakeholders.
There are various ways in which confidentiality can be upheld or maintained in an organization.
One way through which privacy of the company can be maintained is through an establishment
of rules against individuals who violate the privacy rules (Decoc et al., 2018). These rules must
be updated in a regular basis in accordance with the government provide roles. Rules in
pertaining the privacy of employees, customers or the organization at large will promote
adherence to maintaining the confidentiality thus preventing the breach of privacy. This rules in
turn will facilitate better organizational productivity via provision of free and trusted working
environment. The other way of maintaining confidentiality includes creation of awareness among
organization team by emphasizing to them the need for keeping the organizational activities
private (Payne-James, 2018).
Each individual should be sensitized on confidential issues so that in response to maintaining
privacy, all individuals in the organization are working towards maintain the organizational
privacy. The organizational worker force should be made to understand behaviors that are
considered to breach confidentiality of the organization and be informed of the repercussions of
such behaviors. To avoid leakages of information to the wrong hands in an organization, the
organization should strategize on investing in up to date electronic equipment that can be well
managed and maintained in a way that the information will not leak to third parties. To also
minimize information leakages, the methods of disposing crucial information should be in a
professional manner to avoid the unwanted parties to retrieve or access the information
(Herschel, & Miori, 2017). Observing the above mentioned practices will save an organization
from the issues related to breach of confidentiality.
In conclusion, each working environment must create rules concerning adherence organizational
confidentiality and sensitize its employee to ensure they that they do not breath the lows. The
organization can also put in place penalties against those individuals who violate and disobey the
rules and regulations relating to the organization and employee’s privacy in efforts to safeguard
organizational activities and processes. Accountability towards all employees should be
emphasized foe the purpose of indicating the seriousness of the outlined rules and regulations
concerning the organization confidentiality. In the professional context, professionals should

Ethical considerations and professional practices 5
ensure that in their relationship with different individuals, their dignity must be upheld to ensure
that all the customers have confidence in the in their services. The built confidence has the merit
of retaining customers and attracting new customers and investors to the organizational products
and services. Honoring the breach of confidentiality promotes fair competition in the markets
and limits internal and external conflicts that may arise as a result of breaching the organizational
agreements.

Ethical considerations and professional practices 6
References
Congress, E. P. (2017). What social workers should know about ethics: Understanding and
resolving practice dilemmas. Social Work Ethics, 1909.
Decock, S., De Wilde, J., Van Hoof, S., Van Praet, E., & De Clerck, B. (2018). Professional
discourse in multilingual settings: policies and practices. Multilingua, 37(4), 321-330.
Downe, J., Cowell, R., & Morgan, K. (2016). What determines ethical behavior in public
organizations: Is it rules or leadership? Public Administration Review, 76(6), 898-909.
Herschel, R., & Miori, V. M. (2017). Ethics & big data. Technology in Society, 49, 31-36.
International Taskforce on Assessment Center Guidelines. (2015). Guidelines and ethical
considerations for assessment center operations. Journal of Management, 41(4), 1244-1273.
Ljungblom, M., & Lennerfors, T. T. (2018). Virtues and Vices in Project Management Ethics:
An Empirical Investigation of Project Managers and Project Management Students. Project
Management Journal, 49(3), 5-16.
MacLean, T., Litzky, B. E., & Holderness, D. K. (2015). When organizations don’t walk their
talk: A cross-level examination of how decoupling formal ethics programs affects organizational
members. Journal of Business Ethics, 128(2), 351-368.
Ogbari, M. E., Oke, A. O., Ibukunoluwa, A. A., Ajagbe, M. A., & Ologbo, A. C. (2016).
Entrepreneurship and business ethics: Implications on corporate performance. International
Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 6(3S), 50-58.
Payne-James, J. (2018). Confidentiality & consent in police custody: General principles. Journal
of forensic and legal medicine, 57, 66-72.
Spielthenner, G. (2015). Why comply with a code of ethics? Medicine, Health Care and
Philosophy, 18(2), 195-202.