Interview with Simon L Dolan on Building Ethical Organizations
August 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Prof. Simon L Dolan
Professor of Human Resource Management and International Organizational Behaviour, Esade Business School.

• With millions of jobs being cut, the global financial system under serious stress, and many companies across the globe going bankrupt, many have likened this crisis to Great Depression II?What’s your reading of the current financial crisis?
  What is important is not only the label, but what is happening. I think that we are in the midlle of a great transformation. I think that we will, for the first time, examine with honesty the real characteristics of capitalism. I think that governments did not have sufficient control mechanisms, and corporations and individuals were motivated by greed. The crisis, is a crisis of confidence and trust in the economic and the political systems.

• You have been in the forefront making a strong case for honesty and fairness in organizations. What according to you are the critical elements of honesty and fairness in organizations? What are the yardsticks to measure the same?
  Again, you cannot preach for honesty and fairness in organizations if people do not share this idea. I do not believe that organizations have a spirit of themselves. I believe that we can talk about certain people in organizations that assume the role of imposing their view/vision about the notion of efficiency and effectiveness. These people can change their mind. They can be educated. So, honesty and fairness are empty words, unless if everybody in the organization really “walks the talk”. I believe in values that are shared and translated into action. If values, such as honesty and fairness are not aligned with the vision and mission of the company, they become just another empty word. As to definition, i believe that each organization can define operationally the meaning of these values. The key is to share the definition, to believe in it, and to translate it into action.

• In your years of teaching and researching on honesty and fairness, you would have come across quite a few companies known for their best practices. Can you please name a few such ‘honest’ and ‘fair’ companies and what can we learn from those companies’ honest and fair practices over the years?
  Of course i can give you examples. All my examples are connected with the notion of companies behaving ‘professionally’. Professions are those occupations that are governed by a code of ethics (you do not expect a professional lawyer to lie and go to court for his/her employer and lie for the benefit of his employer); you do not expect a medical doctor to not be hygenic when treating a patient just because he had received instructions from his employer for washing his hands after examining 10 patients). Professionals are governed by their occupation. Their loyalty is first and most to their occupation. Drawing a parallel to the organizational level,we can say that honest and fair organizations promote transparency and a culturewhere everything can be discussed and dealt with. These are not utopic organizations; rather, they have instilled the kind of culture that characterized the real professionals (as per examples above) in the true sense of the word. These organizations might have conflicts and problems of managing people and assets like any other organization, but what places them apart is the courage of their leaders to be transparent, ethical and professional in every deed and engagement.

• Many question the relevance of business ethics as a course in MBA programs arguing vehemently that, ‘you cannot teach someone to be ethical, after all’. What has been your experience in delivering this course?
  We, in the business schools, do not (unfortunately) teach students to become effective managers. We teach them and help them develop competences that have to do with understanding of themselves and the corporate world around them. We provide them tools for analysis. For years we thought in the business schools that the only tools that are relevant are those connected with the hard skills (accounting, finance, marketing, etc.). Today, we realize that soft skills are also important to succeed. The problemis that it is very hard to teach these soft skills. Being ethical, or following business ethics is one of the necessary soft skills. Nonetheless, students understand the importance of this concept, and if the course is delivered correctly they also understand that ethics or being ethical for an organization is one of the non-tangible assets of the latter. Albeit the fact that it cannot be measured directly, research has proved repeatedly that it is adding value (including economic value) to the organization. Students understand that in the long term, even the survival of the company can depend on the ethical reputation of it. So, i think that business ethics, especially in the kind of economic world that we see today, should be a must in all business curriculum.