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The inquiry of ethical dilemmas and moral predicaments continues to be a significant problem for managers in most workplace environments (Brown & Trevino, 2006). Managers oftentimes find themselves in difficult situations where they must make decisions that uphold organizational ethics, policies, and honor their morality (Brown & Trevino, 2006; Trevino, 2018; Verschoor, 2018). Mostly, employee actions put managers in these compromising situations, where they may be required to make some trying ethical decisions. Considering these perspectives, this study discusses a variety of research on employee actions and other factors that may pose ethical dilemmas to managers. The study also investigates research done by other scholars about management ethical dilemmas and tries to establish the research gaps on what researchers might not have not wholly accomplished in the past. The study proposes to take a qualitative approach to investigate what managers have been doing in the past to address the question of what they must do in the future when they encounter real-world ethical quandaries.
Keywords: ethical dilemmas, ethics, management, managers, morality, employees actions, research, organization, policies
INTRODUCTION
Ethics is a fundamental building block of professionalism. Different disciplines subscribe to different ethical codes of conduct; however, the ultimate values of morality must remain paramount in any profession. In the modem world, managers always have problems trying to handle ethical cases at their workplaces. Employees do things that they consider minor issues with no substantial implication, but in the end, they equate to gross violation of ethical codes of conduct (Ferrell, 2016). Since management is of different levels, and work descriptions vary in various professions, workplaces have different moral codes. Therefore, the question of workplace ethics remains an ongoing mystery. A lot depends on a variety of situational specifics, contextual factors, and workplace environments. Many factors within and without the workplace can contribute to ethical dilemmas. Communications, ethical theories, workplace environments, and the perceptions of managers are some of the primary factors that continue to facilitate or exacerbate the recurrence of organizational ethical dilemmas.
The workplace environment has diverse people with various cultural, professional, religious, and economic backgrounds. These people bring diversity together to aid in success of the company; however, there must be something that brings uniformity among these groups of people. Moral uprightness is...