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Abstract
The ethical role of a manager is particularly essential in project management given the typical complexities of scope, considerable budgets and schedule constraints that face project managers today. The Project Management Institute (PMI) has developed and adopted a Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to support the work of project managers. Ethical challenges faced by project managers, as identified in the literature, are examined by an analysis of top project management journals to answer questions regarding the study of ethical challenges to project managers in the context of the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. This article examines the link between ongoing ethics research in project management and that of the guiding principles of the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct as outlined by the Project Management Institute. The results indicate a variety of research connections with the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, which confirms the idea that the code is helpful in supporting the actions of project managers.
1. Introduction and Background
In the complicated world of project management, the project manager is likely to face many ethical issues and decisions within the project's scope. In an effort to support project managers' ethical complexities, a guide to ethics has been revised and adopted by the Project Management Institute (PMI). This guide is the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct which provides an ethical framework to assist project managers to maintain high ethical standards in their work. The PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct has been in existence in some form since the 1980's with its current form ratified by the organization in 2006. The PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct is intended as a tool to guide project management practitioners in the execution of their management efforts within accepted standards of ethics and with high integrity.
Current ethical challenges that project managers face exhibit a variety of situations that may be categorized through an analysis of top project management journals to answer several questions regarding the study of project management ethics in the context of the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Current project management research efforts containing ethical elements in recent journal articles were benchmarked to the key ethics values of responsibility, respect, fairness and...