A Comprehensive Report on Values, Ethics, and Collaborative Working

This report examines the interconnected concepts of values, ethics, and collaborative working through three distinct tasks. The first task analyzes the concept of ethics, factors influencing it, and its significance in the workplace, using case studies like Tesla and McDonald's. The second task explores corporate social responsibility (CSR), issues faced by new employees, and expectations of the public and clients, as well as legal rights under GDPR. The third task focuses on collaborative working, including strategies, guiding values, interpersonal skills, benefits, and measures to promote equality and diversity, along with the consequences of poor collaboration. The report incorporates relevant legislation, ethical practices, and real-world examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of these crucial aspects of organizational behavior and management.

Values, Ethics and Working
Collaboratively
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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Task 1 – Newspaper Article.............................................................................................................3
A. Concept of ethics and factors influencing ethics....................................................................3
B. Importance of workplace ethics in an organisation................................................................4
C. Laws promoting good ethical practice in an organisation......................................................5
Task 2 Create a Cause and Effect Essay..........................................................................................6
A. Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility..........................................................................6
B. Issues faced by a new employee and expectations of public and clients from employee......7
C. Legal rights of people in relation to GDPR............................................................................7
Task 3 – Report................................................................................................................................8
A. Collaborative Working...........................................................................................................8
B. Relevant Strategies.................................................................................................................9
C. Guiding values........................................................................................................................9
D. Required interpersonal skills..................................................................................................9
E. Benefits of collaborative working........................................................................................10
F. Measures to promote equality and diversity in workplace...................................................10
G. British Values embedded into collaborative working..........................................................11
H. Consequences of poor collaborative working......................................................................11
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................12
References......................................................................................................................................13
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Introduction
Ethics are the values that enables organisational resources to work collaboratively. This
assessment is aimed at assessing the related concepts of values, ethics and working
collaboratively (Lapadat, 2017). It is divided into 3 tasks. First task is to understand the concept
of ethics and its importance in business setting. Second task is to understand the responsibility of
employee towards business and business towards society. Third task is to develop an
understanding of collaborative working.
Task 1 – Newspaper Article
A. Concept of ethics and factors influencing ethics
Tesla's lock-down defiance
Electric Auto-maker Tesla was caught in 2020 with the attempts of defying lock-down orders.
In May, company restarted its vehicle production without permission and without taking
adequate measures for safety. As a result, Tesla workers were found positive in large number
and those who protested against it, were given termination letters (The biggest business
scandals of 2020, 2020).
Above-mentioned case is a clear violation of business ethics. Business ethics refers to the set of
values, principles and standards that is expected of a business organisation to observe in the
case of contingencies and potentially controversial subjects. It deals with the right and wrong in
relation to the corporate governance, corporate social responsibilities and fiduciary
responsibilities. No law defines the business ethics but provides guideline under various laws
that sets the tone for the ethical values that are expected out of business organisations, in order
to be more society friendly.
Other than laws and regulations, there are various factors that influence business ethics such as
personal code of ethics, ethical values adopted by company and social pressure (Wang and et.
al., 2020). These impact decision-making process of the management of the company. Tesla is a
ethical company and has clearly defined ethical code of conduct. Present market condition
requires safety and hygiene to be kept at paramount. It is the time when company dealing in
non-essential products needs to keep their social and personnel concerns over their economic
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and profit concerns. Tesla however, behaved contradictorily and its top management reopened
production facility without taking care of safety of workers which resulted in increased
COVID-19 cases in the workers. Even then, rather than behaving in a socially responsible
manner, company threatened to terminate the employees or depriving them of their jobs in the
times when people were already suffering job insecurity. Tesla needed to reconsider their
business practices in alignment with the expectations of the ethical practices expected from
them and the business conditions (Laukkanen and Tura, 2020).
B. Importance of workplace ethics in an organisation
Soup by McDonald's
CEO of McDonald's Steve Easterbrook was fired by the board in the end of 2019 for sexting
with a subordinate. Company filed a lawsuit against Easterbrook, in which he was further
alleged that he maintained physical relationship with three employees and had also approved
stock grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to one of the woman employee, against
company policies. Company wants him to pay-back while Easterbrook maintains that company
knew about the transaction, so there is no need for repayment and that relations were consensual
so they were not wrong and that his resignation is only goodwill gesture (The biggest business
scandals of 2020, 2020).
The case is still going on and both company and ex-CEO maintains their stand. But, the
question here is not just about the monetary compensation and relationship with employee. It is
about work-culture and work place ethics. Both the management and staff has some ethical
rules which should be observed such as stock grants to employees must be according to
company policies and no policy shall be bend to give undue benefit to any employee because of
the personal relationship of the company personnels. It is very important not to take undue
advantage of ethical practices otherwise it might lead to development of toxic culture in the
organisation.
Workplace ethics are very important for they lead to positive developments in the company,
help it improve its productivity and performance and enlightens its future path of success
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(Freudenreich, Lüdeke-Freund and Schaltegger, 2020). It promotes co-operation and teamwork
and enables alignment of behaviour of employees. This helps fostering trust and positive
environment in the company. It also helps company in developing a public image and
maintaining it in the eyes of public. High goodwill helps attracting larger investors and
customers. It also provides emotional security to the employees when they do not need to face
harassment and are treated with respect. In return, they protect company assets from thefts,
frauds and falsification.
C. Laws promoting good ethical practice in an organisation
Ethical Practices in an organisation
Workplace ethics can be said to be a dynamic set of values which vary with organisation and its
people (Breuer and Lüdeke-Freund, 2017). It is very important for all organisations to embrace
ethical practices and behaviours to improve organisational productivity and uphold integrity.
These set of practices are influenced by the mission, vision and values of the organisation and
needs to abide by the applicable legislations. For example, suppose a company operates in some
products which are toxic chemicals. Then, it is ethically required to maintain and upheld all the
proper safety conditions. They need to provide safety suits to the employees working with those
chemicals and also, provide them necessary training to deal with those chemicals safely.
Companies in the UK have to decide for their ethical practices based on the rules given in
company law which is known as Companies Act 2006. It specifies the ethical code of conduct
related to directors, business, auditors, employees and shareholders of the company. For
example, it is required by the law for companies to get their accounts audited and file all their
financial accounts with them Companies House periodically. It is to ensure that shareholders are
provided complete and true information. It is responsibility of directors to file the reports and in
case, they deliberately performs misconduct, they are not only ethically held responsible but
also, morally responsible (Freeman, 2017).
Another legislation which governs ethical practices in UK are UK Corporate Governance Code.
It is a set of principles that aims to develop good corporate practices for the London Stock
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Exchange Listed companies. It specifies listing rules and declares compliance practices that
companies are required to adopt and practice. It is overseen by Financial Reporting Council and
is aimed at ensuring long-term sustainable growth of the economy of UK. For example, it is
legal and ethical responsibility of the directors of public limited company to disclose their
compliances and explain where compliance has not been made (Wang and et. al., 2020).
Task 2 Create a Cause and Effect Essay
A. Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to the policy of the company which states
its responsibilities towards delivering economic, social and environmental benefits to the society
from which it derives its resources. There are 4 main components of CSR activities namely,
environmental concern, human resource concern, financial concern and societal concern. Every
company sets aside some parts of their profit to perform CSR activities.
Unilever is a large company and has its defined Code of Business Principles. It has
divided its policy in accordance with the value that drives company and covers guidelines related
to employee health and safety, ethical behaviour, product quality and environmental aspects. For
environmental concerns, it aims to run business in an environmentally sustainable manner i.e. its
raw materials and finished products have least impact over the environment and pledges to
generate minimum amount of waste. For human resource or personnel concerns, it strives to
recruit, employ and promote employees on sole basis of qualifications, merits and abilities. They
are provided safe, healthy and discrimination-free working environment. On other hand,
employees are expected to avoid personal activities and financial interests that can create conflict
with professional commitment (Schaltegger and Burritt, 2018). For financial concerns, it
maintains full and transparent disclosures of all material transactions, so that its investors and
shareholders do not feel cheated. For societal concerns, it has clear policies of providing good
quality products, engaging in fair competition, not engaging in bribery activities, etc. Unilever
actively engages with UN Sustainable Development Goals and make lots of efforts for SDG 6
for water conservation. It collaborates with various governments, NGOs and local people to
provide them clean and safe drinking water (Water Use, 2021). However, CSR activities of
company are not all good. It has its shares of setbacks and had been accused of environmental
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and sexual harassment controversies. It was accused of exposing its employees with toxic
elements like mercury in one of its thermometer plants in India and that its officers sexually
harassed workers in Africa.
B. Issues faced by a new employee and expectations of public and clients from employee
Whenever a person joins an organisation as a new employee, many problems arise which
are either adjustment issues or discovery issues. In other words, a new employee faces problem
in fitting in a new culture. It takes time to understand the colleagues, work, work attitudes, etc.
They make mistakes, are not heard by seniors, face office bullies, back-stabbers or might have to
face harassment or discrimination (Etter, Fieseler and Whelan, 2019). It is the time when attitude
and interpersonal skills of an employee matters. It takes a while to gain the trust of co-workers
and superiors. Therefore, it is needed for an employee to have good communication skills,
negotiation and influencing skills and management skills so that one can adjust in the new work
space in the least time. One must avoid office gossips or be part of trouble makers. Professional
attitude and dignified treatment to others takes a person to the long run.
It takes time for an employee to understand, adapt and evolve the work-culture. However,
they still cannot get away from the expectations of the company, clients and public. Company
and management expects employee to report as scheduled at work, perform assigned duties and
responsibilities with the utmost sincerity, respect work culture and co-workers, not engage in
power politics, etc. Clients only have interactions with the employees who are in-charge of
dealing with them and from those employees, they expect professionalism and quality in
business dealing and negotiation, so that they can maintain strong and healthy long-term
relationships with the company. Further, general public expects from employees of an
organisation that they would perform operations of their firm in sustainability with environment
and will provide quality products in market (Borchardt and et. al., 2020). They use resources
taken from the society and would give back returns to society in form of welfare efforts and
would not indulge in such practices voluntarily for the sake of shareholders' wealth maximisation
that would harm society and other stakeholders in general.
C. Legal rights of people in relation to GDPR
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a legal framework which covers
guidelines related to collection and processing of the personal information of the individuals. It
provides many rights to the individuals to maintain their personal data privacy such as Right to
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be informed. This right states that information processed from the personal data must be concise,
clear and transparent. Personal data must be obtained with permission and individual must be
informed about the processing of their personal data (Individuals’ Rights, 2020). Another right is
Right to access, which says that individual must be provided access to their data free of charge in
a commonly used format such as electronic format. Right to rectification says that individuals
have the entitlement to get their personal data rectified if they found it inaccurate or incomplete.
They can submit rectification request within stipulated time and also, inform third party to
change their data, with whom they have shared it. Right to erasure says that individual have the
right to get their data deleted when the purpose for which their personal data had been collected,
is no longer necessary. Also, if the individual withdraws consent, data needs to be deleted
especially by marketers. Right to restrict processing states that individual can get the processing
of their personal data blocked or restricted if, individual has legitimate objection or individual
believes processing is unlawful or the company doubts the accuracy of the personal data
provided. Right to data portability states that individuals can obtain and reuse the personal data
provided by them across different platforms for their own purposes, in the case of, personal data
provided to a controller or when the processing is automated or in the case, when processing has
been based on the individual's consent that too for the performance of any contract. Right to
object states that individuals have right under which they can object to and stop processing direct
marketing channels which, uses their personal data.
Task 3 – Report
A. Collaborative Working
Collaborative working refers to the working in partnership i.e. it involves a whole
spectrum of methods that can be adopted by two or more than two teams within an organisation
or two or more organisations for working together. They can either be in form of informal
association or formal alliances (Ahsan, 2020). This collaboration can be for any period of time,
temporary or a permanent arrangement. It is beneficial as it helps in pooling the resources and
making better and more efficient use of them. For example, Liberty Global and Telefonica
decided to collaborate and merge their British business to emerge as a market leader in the
mobile and broadband sector and their personnel jointly created a new collaborative teams to
work together.
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B. Relevant Strategies
In order to promote collaborative working in the organisation, below mentioned strategies
can be adopted:
 Highlight company's vision, mission and value statement over and over again (Malshe
and Friend, 2018).
 Communicate expectations from the team personnel about the collaboration in adherence
with the team's goals and values which they should inhibit and exhibit.
 Promote working environment like a community which is able to highlight strengths of
team members, encourage their creativity and foster open and honest communication
channels, which enable them to develop interpersonal relations and improve their
commitment with the team and the organisation.
 Team leader should lead by example and either follow transformative leadership or
democratic leadership. Celebrate each milestone and share knowledge, resources and
insight with all team members.
C. Guiding values
Collaborative working involves both formal and informal interactions to promote the
mutual harmony among the team members (Best and et. al., 2021). A organisation can have
below mentioned guiding values to promote collaborative working:
 Focus on value creation - It says that management should develop teams with a target for
them in the mind and teams shall have focus on value creation. It is responsibility of team
leader to maintain harmony among the team members that they co-operate and
collaborate with each other to create value.
 Promote visibility - Organisational operations are complex which promotes friction
among the personnels and teams. Therefore, organisations shall focus on creating teams
based on specialities and set clear channels that define communication channel and
promote visibility.
D. Required interpersonal skills
Interpersonal skills help improve team efficiency and effectiveness by improving inter-
personal relations amongst the team members. Skills facilitating building trust in the team,
communication, leadership, conflict management, creative problem solving, negotiation and
influencing skills, etc. play an important role in team building and promoting environment within
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team members to work collaboratively intra-team and inter-teams in the organisation (Hawkins
and Turner, 2019).
 Communication skills - Effective communication skills facilitate smooth collaboration,
coordination and co-operation amongst team members. It helps in discussions,
negotiations, presentations and brainstorming.
 Decision making skills - Decision making skills of team leaders facilitate collaborative
working as it helps in problem solving and conflict management.
 Time management skills - Time management is very important to ensure that team goal is
effectively achieved. It facilitates planning, monitoring and controlling.
E. Benefits of collaborative working
Benefits of collaborative working are mentioned below:
 Save time and resources - Collaborative working encourages centralisation of resources
and creation of a platform that can be accessed by all team members. It enhances saving
time and other resources by reducing wastage.
 Improved productivity - Collaboration helps in improving the technology and efficiency
of the operational processes. It also enhances morale of the employees which results in
improvement in their productivity.
 Shared responsibilities - Collaboration facilitates delegation of the responsibilities in
horizontal and vertical manners. This eases off responsibility over a single individual and
let them be more free to explore their creativity and improve work productivity.
 Improved creativity and flexibility - Collaborative working facilitates more people to do
brainstorming together. It improves the chances of better creative outcome and versatility
in dealings of the company (Cosenz, Rodrigues and Rosati, 2020).
F. Measures to promote equality and diversity in workplace
With increasing globalisation, it is likely that an organisation recruits people of various
culture. Therefore, in order to maintain a more diverse culture, an organisation needs to have
inclusive company culture. Some measures are mentioned below:
 Create such policies that promote diversity and are flexible enough to let employee
decide to express and practice according to their own culture.
 Create standard employment policies that do not discriminate between employees either
on gender, race, ethnicity or any other basis.
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 Employees must be provided diversity training or just open negotiation time with each
other that can help break ice between employees of different genders or ethnicities.
 Teams developed should be diverse enough that provide different people an opportunity
to work together and develop a professional bond with each other (Kourula, Pisani and
Kolk, 2017 ).
G. British Values embedded into collaborative working
British values embedded into collaborative working are below mentioned:
 Mutual respect - Mutual respect for others form part of basic British values and it is
iterated that all the team members behave responsibly towards each other especially with
a regard to religious and racial tolerance.
 Tolerance - It is expected that people working in the collaboration will have tolerance
towards different faiths and beliefs of diverse people working in the together. This
tolerance encourages people to work together in harmony with each other.
 Individual liberty - This value says that while working in a team, a person does not need
to sacrifice their individual identity to the team identity. Therefore, they should be
allowed to make safe and empowered independent decisions.
H. Consequences of poor collaborative working
Collaboration is required to make business processes successful and effective. Poor
collaborative working on the other hand can bring negative consequences for the organisation
which are below mentioned:
 It can lead to waste business opportunity. For example, due to poor collaboration between
teams, firms is not able to file a very important tender on time. It will result in wastage of
business opportunity for the firm which can stunt its growth as well (Kumar and et. al.,
2019).
 It leads to wastage of time and other resources. For example, there is a project in the
construction company jointly managed by the architecture and building team. They had
poor collaboration, which resulted in development and construction of sub-optimal
construction project with time lag and increased cost structure.
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Conclusion
Above assessment undertakes conceptual understanding of ethics, interpersonal values
and collaborative working. It can be concluded that they enable employees and the business to
develop a working culture that treats everyone with dignity and takes organisation to the path of
success.
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References
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Wang, X. and et. al., 2020. Towards an ethical and trustworthy social commerce community for
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