Unethical Employee Behaviour MGTS 1601

Unethical Employee Behaviour
Unethical employee behaviour has been something that all employers have been facing for some time now. This has proved to be something that employers have to think about when dealing with these types of employees and it may affect their decisions when hiring as well. Dictionary.com gives the definition of unethical as “lacking moral principles; unwilling to adhere to proper rules of conduct”. There are many ways an employee can display unethical behaviour such as stealing in the organization, which we will be looking at in this essay. This has been proven to be a problem for employers all over the world and there needs to be steps in place to curb this problem of unethical behaviour. Derived from The European Retail Theft Barometer, which is a Europe wide study of crime in the retail sector, it has been reported that retail crimes have cost European businesses £29.6 billion in 2001 (Bamfield, 2002). Stealing company’s property is defined as ‘any unauthorized appropriation of company property by an employee either for one’s own use of or sale to another. It includes but is not limited to, the removal of products, supplies, materials, funds, data, information or intellectual property’ (Greenberg, 1997:86). Stealing from businesses can turn out to be a very costly affair as it may harm the business in the long run with problems such as bankruptcy and a decline in the reputation of the business. There can be many reasons why an employee would steal from the workplace and these reasons must be looked into and following that, appropriate steps can be taken to provide suggestions on ways to curb this problem.
Why do employees steal from the workplace? Employees’ stealing from the business is an extreme show of employee dishonesty and no employer wishes to have these kind of employees in the workplace. Therefore, there has to be a stoppage of this problem in every workplace. The magnitude of this issue is greater than most of us would anticipate. Many employees who involve themselves in the act of stealing would disguise this by displaying a great amount of honesty and appear to have the company’s best interests at heart. This makes it much more challenging for employers to distinguish between how good a worker you actually are or is that just a front you are putting up. From a study that was conducted by Michael G. Kessler & Associates Ltd, they have documented that 66% of employees would steal if they see their fellow colleagues doing the same thing (Investigation.com,2014). Ethical work climates can be used as a judgement to establish why unethical behaviour occurs in the workplace (Weber, Kurke and Pentico, 2003).