Andrea Tomasi

DESIGNING ETHICAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH AND SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE

World peace and social justice requires the existence of ethical organizations that provide high‐quality goods and services and are places for spiritual growth and development.

The emerging field of Spirituality at work provides new energy to the well‐established field of business ethics and social responsibility by directing organizational leaders to achieve superior financial performance and productivity in harmony with ethical behavior and spiritual transcendence.

I can provide a systematic model organizational leaders can implement to infuse ethics and spirituality throughout operations.

The model offers processes, practices, and structures that reinforce ethical behaviors and allow personal spirituality to flourish.

The organization systems approach embraces the best practices for determining the ethics of job candidates, codes of ethics, ethical decision‐making, ethics and diversity training, ethics officers and hotlines, ethical leadership, ethical work goals and performance appraisals, environmental management, and community outreach.

Religion Ethics and Spiritual Relationship: RES, ANTE REM and POST REM.

The dimension where Religion, Ethics and Spirituality (RES) overlap: “A Person should exhibit humility, kindness and service to others with the intention of becoming a better person, creating a better organization and making the World a Better Place.

People employed by organizations that score higher on spirituality factors also exhibit higher levels of job involvement, organizational identification and work reward satisfaction, and lower levels of organizational frustration.

Individuals with high levels of Spirituality, when matched with organizations of High Spirituality, are likely to be more highly motivated to make a difference, more committed to the organization and more flexible toward organizational change.

An organization systems approach to the problem of unethical behaviors associated with morally imperfect employees is essential to both minimize costs associated Ethical Risks, such as lawsuit, theft, high turnover and help organizational stakeholders fulfill their spiritual purpose.

The complex functioning of the universe, earth, and human life are miracles. The Earth orbits the sun at a speed of 67,000 miles an hour while rotating on its axis at 1000 miles an hour.

If the Earth’s orbit shifted a tiny bit all human existence would cease, causing us to freeze or burn to death. There are approximately 100 trillion microscopic cells that sustain the life of a human body, which can be destroyed by the multiplication of one cancerous cell.

Yet, humans have created political, economic, and organizational systems that damage the Earth and individuals.

As suggested by the three opening quotes, numerous ethical violations found within all organizations can be addressed by spiritually sensitive managers who design organizations as places for social connection in a manner that enhances organizational efficiency and effectiveness, and help employees recognize work as a calling.

Scholars in business ethics and spirituality typically offer a grab bag of concerns and solutions regarding this historical problem.

Environmental management.

Ethical organizations place a high value on appropriately managing the Earth’s scarce resources and creating environmentally healthy workplaces for their employees.

Appropriately managing interactions between the organization and the natural environment grounds the organization within its surrounding eco- system.

Wal-Mart’s focus on becoming ecofriendly, rooted in cost-saving and new revenue streams, has created a more favorable public image of the previously maligned company (Hemphill 2005). Wal-Mart’s initial egoistic justification provides opportunities for heightened awareness and consciousness, an essential step along the spiritual path.

Managers can achieve superior environmental performance by implementing a wide variety of environmental management techniques, including (Nattrass and Altomare 1999; Esty and Winston 2006):

●creating an Environmental Management System (EMS) plan that documents relevant organizational procedures ●conducting an environmental risk assessment; ●using The Natural Step (TNS) objectives to develop action plans; ●redesigning the product to achieve zero waste; ●operating in green buildings that have earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification; and ●developing performance indicators to measure continuous improvement, and reporting the results of these efforts.

The EMS plan should document how the organization conducts environmen- tal policy development, environmental planning and implementation, environ- mental monitoring and corrective actions, and management review. Managers should annually audit the EMS plan to ensure that the procedures are operating effectively.

Managing the environmental change process entails assigning day-to-day responsibilities to an environmental manager supported by top management.

A cross-functional “green team,” composed of influential go-getters, should create an environmental vision and strategy, use the TNS framework to assess current environmental performance, and experience success by initially solving a relatively easy problem.

The most common areas for improving environmental performance (and reducing costs) are energy use, waste disposal, paper use,product packaging, toxic substances, and business travel.

Environmental management activities provide managers with a unique opportunity to connect employees to a nature-based spirituality.

The functioning of the Earth is a miraculous activity.

Engaging in continuous improvement activitieslinking employee behavior and organizational outcomes with the omnipresence of nature deepens one’s sense of awe about nature’s impact on individual well-being

Community outreach

An ethical organization aspires to be a model citizen, joining other stakeholders in creating vibrant communities for the well-being of its employees and other residents.

Developing outreach activities that enhance community well-being connects the organization with its geographical location and the life of its employees outside of work.

Companies can give nonprofit and community organizations money, products or services, and skills, and provide job opportunities for nontraditional employee populations.

A systematic giving program would integrate all four areas.

Money can be directly donated to community organizations or linked to the sales of particular products.

Products or services can be given to community organizations for use by its employees and clients, or to leverage as fundraising auction items.

Companies can provide employees with paid time to volunteer their services for community organizations, or offer employees community service sabbaticals.

The volunteer activity is an opportunity for employees to further develop project management and leadership skills, and to participate in team-building activities. Companies can serve the community by offering job opportunities to nontraditional employees, such as people with disabilities or ex-convicts.

Managers can reactively give to community organizations on a first-come first-serve basis, outsource giving to the United Way and other mediating orga- nizations, or proactively give by developing a few key strategic partnerships with nonprofit organizations aligned with the company’s mission.

Cause-relatedmarketing (Berglind and Nakata 2005) and organizational sponsorships (Farrelly and Quester 2005) help build brand loyalty. Businesses should pursue an integrative approach that involves all three types of recipients.

An ideal strategic partnership is one where both the company and the commu- nity organization benefit from the arrangement (Porter and Kramer 2002).

Managers should determine which community organization benefits the most from the company’s products, services, and employee skill set, and also has a similar customer, labor, and supplier profile.

This provides the foundation for a win–win opportunity, one that benefits both the community organization and the company. Strategic partnership objectives must be transparent, fair, and realistic, and communication between the partners must be two-way.

Many nonprofit service organizations are formed as a result of market failure.

They care for people who lose their jobs or do not earn sufficient wages to financially care for themselves or their families.

Strategic partnerships enhance interactions between for-profit and nonprofit employees, transforming barriers based on their different missions into new understandings about how they need each other, and can support each other. Communities need both economic growth and better quality of life.

Employees should be involved in the company’s outreach decision-making process.

The community involvement process should be carefully monitored, and the outcomes measured, assessed, and shared with the community.

Philanthropy is among the most easily identified signs of benevolence from a giver and receiver, and an act that enriches the lives of both.

An organization systems approach is necessary to develop a culture of high integ- rity and accountability rather than responding to each ethical problem and asso- ciated cost piecemeal, or going from one crisis to the next (Hall et al. 2007; Kayes et al. 2007).

Ethical risks can be reduced, and spiritual development enhanced, by implementing processes, practices, and structures that generate and reinforce ethical behaviors aligned with an organization’s mission to be the best that it can be.

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines implemented in 1991 encourage busi- nesses to voluntarily adopt some of the best practices in business ethics.

If an employee commits a crime, an organization with a robust Ethics Compliance Program receives a reduction in fine. The Optimal Ethics Systems Model provides a more elaborate and systematic “best practices” framework for reducing ethical risks and enhancing spirituality by integrating ethics throughout the workplace. Figure 2. Organizational systems approach to reduce ethical risks. The organization systems approach includes best practices in determining the ethics of job candidates, ethical decision-making, ethics and diversity training, ethics officers and hotlines, ethical leadership, ethical work goals and perfor- mance appraisals, environmental management, and community outreach. All of these ethics mechanisms require assessment and modifications based on feed- back from those they affect.

By systematically implementing all of the 11 elements in the model, the organization will not only attract employees desiring to experience spiritual transformation through work on a daily basis, but also have in place structures, policies, and processes that will aid employees with their daily spiritual development and engage them in a transcendent vision.

These best practices parallel the Buddhist conception of an Eightfold Path. According to Buddhism, enlightenment requires that an individual recognize everyone suffers. Suffering can cease by practicing the Eightfold Path, which consists of Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration (Hanh 1998). Each element of the Eightfold Path is essential, and each element is interrelated with the other seven elements

The terms “spirituality” and “ethics” overlap to some extent.

Ethics is typically defined as a set of principles a person uses to differentiate “right” and “wrong.”

Spirituality“refers to individuals’ drive to experience transcendence, or a deeper meaning to life, through the way in which they live and work.”

One way to experience transcendence and deeper meaning is by being ethical, and vice versa.

An individual who reasons according to the principles of utilitarianism, deontology, and justice, the highest stages of moral development (Kohlberg 1981), transcends self-interest, social group preferences, and national interests. Spirituality provides an extra justification for reasoning and acting based on the highest levels of ethical theorizing, and for serving the broader purpose of becoming a better person and making organizations and the world a better place.

But not everything spiritual is ethical, and vice versa.

Egoism is an ethical theory that highlights the appropriateness of considering one’s own self-interest when making moral conclusions, such as in determining which job offer to accept.

Egoism, however, is not spiritual transcendence.

Similarly, one can be spiritual but not ethical.

In Genesis, Sarah tells her son Jacob to steal his older brother’s birthright by lying to his blind and dying father. Jacob obeys his mother to fulfill a higher mission, but his lie violates deontology.

More modern examples are individuals who mistreat, or even kill, others in the name of God.

These individuals provide spiritual justifications for behaving unethically.

The most compelling justification for an action is one based on spirituality and ethics. Spirituality also overlaps, but differs from, “religion.”

A spiritual person may not belong to a particular religious denomination. Religion refers to theological doctrines (“Jesus is God incarnate”) or specific practices (Muslim prayer five times a day). As shown in Figure 1, aspects of religion that overlap with both ethics and spirituality include the importance of applying the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you want done to you”) or practicing humility and kindness, and serving others through charity and altruistic love.