Professional Values:Professional Ethics, Ethical Dilemmas, Technical Ineptness

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Organization Development MGMT 628

Lesson 13

Professional Values

Values have played an important role in organization development from its beginning. Traditionally, OD

professionals have promoted a set of values under a humanistic framework, including a concern for inquiry

and science, democracy and being helpful. They have sought to build trust and collaboration; to create an

open, problem-solving climate; and to increase the self-control of organization members. More recently,

OD practitioners have extended those humanistic values to include a concern for improving organizational

effectiveness (for example, to increase productivity or to reduce turnover) and performance (for example,

to increase profitability). They have shown an increasing desire to optimize both human benefits and

production objectives.

We can gain some understanding of the values represented by OD by referring to sensitivity training. This

method of education and change has a humanistic value orientation, the belief that it is worthwhile to have

the opportunity throughout their lives to learn and develop personally toward a full realization and

actualization of individual potential.

Another OD value that came even more directly from sensitivity training is that people's feelings are just as

important a source of data for diagnosis and have as much implication for change as do facts or so-called

hard data and people's thoughts and opinions, and that these feelings should be considered as legitimate for

expression in the organization as any thought, fact, or opinion.

Yet another OD value stemming from sensitivity training is that conflict, whether interpersonal or inter-

group, should be brought to the surface and dealt with directly, rather than ignored, avoided, or

manipulated.

When sensitivity training was at the height of its popularity, two main value systems considered were: a

spirit of inquiry, and democracy.

The spirit of inquiry comes from the values of science. Two parts of it are relevant: the hypothetical spirit

being tentative checking on the validity of assumptions, and allowing for errors; and experimentation

putting ideas or assumptions to the test. In sensitive training, "all experienced behavior is subjected to

questioning and examination, limited only by the threshold of tolerance to truth and new ideas".

The second main value system, the democratic value has two elements: collaboration, and conflict

resolution through rational means. The learning process in sensitivity training is collaborative between

participant and trainer, not a traditional authoritarian student-teacher relationship. By conflict resolution

through rational means, it is meant that irrational behavior or emotion was off limits, but "that there is a

problem-solving orientation to conflict rather than the more traditional approaches based on bargains,

power plays, suppression, or compromise".

More recently, OD practitioners have extended those humanistic values to include a concern for:

improving organizational effectiveness (for example, to increase productivity or to reduce turnover), and

improving performance (for example, to increase profitability).

They have shown an increasing desire to optimize both human benefits and production objectives.

It is painfully obvious that most organizations treat their most valued resources employees as if they

were expendable. The all-too-frequent attitude among managers is, "If our employees don't like the jobs we

provide, they can find employment elsewhere, we pay them a fair wage and they receive excellent fringe

benefits." In the name of efficiency and economic or top management pressure, some people in

organizations may be bored, some may be discriminated against, and many may be treated unfairly or

inequitably regarding their talent and performance. If OD helps correct these imbalances, it is long

overdue, but what about the organization? If it doesn't survive, there will be no jobs, no imbalances to

correct. Of the two words, represented by OD, Practitioners have spent more time on development than

on organization. They are equally important; however, if either is out of balance, the OD consultant's goal

is to redress the imbalance.

OD's right goal grows from its proper setting. If the proper setting is organizations, then there is only one

right goal for OD, i.e. to confront an issue that is the tension between freedom and constraint. OD's right

purpose is to redress the balance between freedom and constraint.

There is always tension between the two the autonomy of the individual and the requirements of the

organization. It is practically impossible to determine the proper balance but, when either factor is

obviously out of balance, the OD consultant's goal is to work toward reducing the heavier side.

The joint values of humanizing organizations and improving their effectiveness have received widespread

support in the OD profession as well as increasing encouragement from managers, employees, and union

officials. Indeed, it would be difficult not to support those joint concerns. But in practice OD professionals

face serious challenges in simultaneously pursuing greater humanism and organizational effectiveness. More

practitioners are experiencing situations in which there is conflict between employees' needs for greater

meaning and the organization's need for more effective and efficient use of its resources. For example,

Organization Development MGMT 628

expensive capital equipment may run most efficiently if it is highly programmed and routinized, but people

may not derive satisfaction from working with such technology. Should efficiency be maximized at the

expense of people's satisfaction? Can technology be changed to make it more humanly satisfying while

remaining efficient? What compromises are possible? How do these tradeoffs shift when they are applied in

different social cultures? These are the value dilemmas often faced when we try to optimize both human

benefits and organizational effectiveness.

In addition to value issues within organizations, OD practitioners are dealing more and more with value

conflicts with powerful outside groups. Organizations are open systems and exist within increasingly

turbulent environments. For example, hospitals are facing complex and changing task environments. This

has led to a proliferation of external stakeholders with interests in the organization's functioning, including

patients, suppliers, medical groups, insurance companies, employers, the government, stockholders, unions,

the press, and various interest groups. Those external groups often have different and competing values for

judging the organization's effectiveness. For example, stockholders may judge the firm in terms of earnings

per share, the government in terms of compliance with equal employment opportunity legislation, patients

in terms of quality of care, and ecology groups in terms of hazardous waste disposal. Because organizations

must rely on these external groups for resources and legitimacy, they cannot simply ignore these competing

values. They must somehow respond to them and try to reconcile the different interests.

Recent attempts to help firms manage external relationships suggest the need for new interventions and

competence in OD. Practitioners must have not only social skills but also political skills. They must un-

derstand the distribution of power, conflicts of interest, and value dilemmas inherent in managing external

relationships and be able to manage their own role and values with respect to those dynamics,

Interventions promoting collaboration and system maintenance may he ineffective in this larger arena,

especially when there are power and dominance relationships among organizations and competition for

scarce resources. Under those conditions, OD practitioners may need more power-oriented interventions,

such as bargaining, coalition forming, and pressure tactics.

For example, firms in the tobacco industry have waged an aggressive campaign against the efforts of

external groups, such as the ILS. Surgeon general, the American Lung Association, and local governments,

to limit or ban the smoking of tobacco products. They have formed a powerful industry coalition to lobby

against antismoking legislation; they have spent enormous sums of money advertising tobacco products,

conducting public relations campaigns, and refuting research purportedly showing the dangers of smoking.

Such power-oriented strategies are intended to manage an increasingly hostile environment and may be

necessary for the industry's survival.

People practicing OD in such settings may need to help organizations implement such strategies if

organizations are to manage their environments effectively. That effort will require political skills and

greater attention to how the OD practitioner's own values fit with those of the organization.

Professional Ethics:

Ethical issues in OD are concerned with how practitioners perform their helping relationship with

organization members. Inherent in any helping relationship is the potential for misconduct and client

abuse. OD practitioners can let personal values stand in the way of good practice or use the power inherent

in their professional role to abuse (often unintentionally) organization members.

Ethical Guidelines:

To its credit, the field of OD always has shown concern for the ethical conduct of its practitioners. There

have been several articles and symposia about ethics in OD. In addition, statements of ethics governing

OD practice have been sponsored by the Organization Development Institute, the American Society for

Training & Development, and a consortium of professional associations in OD. The consortium has jointly

sponsored an ethical code derived from a large-scale project conducted at the Center for the Study of

Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology- The project's purposes included preparing

critical incidents describing ethical dilemmas and using that material for professional and continuing

education in OD, providing an empirical basis for a statement of values and ethics for OD professionals,

and initiating a process for making the ethics of OD practice explicit on a continuing basis. The ethical

guidelines from that project appear in the appendix to this chapter.

Ethical Dilemmas:

Although adherence to statements of ethics helps prevent the occurrence of ethical problems, OD

practitioners still can encounter ethical dilemmas. Figure 17 is a process model that explains how ethical

dilemmas can occur in OD. The antecedent conditions include an OD practitioner and a client system with

different goals, values, needs, skills, and abilities. During the entry and contracting phase these differences

may or may not be addressed and clarified. If the contracting process is incomplete, the subsequent

Organization Development MGMT 628

intervention process or role episode is subject to role conflict and role ambiguity. Neither the client nor the

OD practitioner is clear about respective responsibilities. Each party is pursuing different goals, and each is

using different skills and values to achieve those goals. The role conflict and ambiguity may produce five

types of ethical dilemmas: misrepresentation, misuse of data, coercion, value and goal conflict, and

technical ineptness.

Figure: 17

Misrepresentation: Misrepresentation occurs when OD practitioners claim that an intervention will

produce results that are unreasonable for the change program or the situation. The client can contribute to

the problem by portraying inaccurate goals and needs. In either case, one or both parties are operating

under false pretenses and an ethical dilemma exists. For example, in an infamous case called "The

Undercover Change Agent." an attempt was made to use laboratory training in an organization whose top

management did not understand it and was not ready for it. The OD consultant sold T-groups as the

intervention that would solve the problems facing the organization. After the president of the firm made a

surprise visit to the site where the training was being held, the consultant was fired because the nature and

style of the T-group was in direct contradiction to the president's concepts about leadership.

Misrepresentation is likely to occur in the entering and contracting phases of planned change when the

initial consulting relationship is being established- To prevent misrepresentation, OD practitioners need to

gain clarity about the goals of the change effort and to explore openly with the client its expected effects, its

relevance to the client system, and the practitioner's competence in executing the intervention.

Misuse of Data: Misuse of data occurs when information gathered during the OD process is used

punitively. Large amounts of information are invariably obtained during the entry and diagnostic phases of

OD. Although most OD practitioners value openness and trust, it is important that they be aware of how

such data are going to be used. It is a human tendency to use data to enhance a power position. Openness

is one thing, but leaking inappropriate information can be harmful to individuals and to the organization. It

is easy for a consultant, under the guise of obtaining information, to gather data about whether a particular

manager is good or bad. When, how, or if this information can be used is an ethical dilemma not easily

resolved. To minimize misuse of data, practitioners should reach agreement up front with organization

members about how data collected during the change process will be used. This agreement should be

reviewed periodically in light of changing circumstances.

Coercion: Coercion occurs when organization members are forced to participate in an OD intervention.

People should have the freedom to choose whether to participate in a change program if they are to gain

self-reliance to solve their own problems. In team building, for example, team members should have the

Organization Development MGMT 628

option of deciding not to become involved in the intervention. Management should not decide unilaterally

that team building is good for members. However, freedom to make a choice requires knowledge about

OD. Many organization members have little information about OD interventions, what they involve, and

the nature and consequences of becoming involved with them. This makes it imperative for OD

practitioners to educate clients about interventions before choices are made for implementing them.

Coercion also can pose ethical dilemmas for the helping relationship between OD practitioners and

organization members. Inherent in any helping relationship are possibilities for excessive manipulation and

dependency, two facets of coercion. Kelman pointed out that behavior change "inevitably involves some

degree of manipulation and control, and at least an implicit imposition of the change agent's values on the

client or the person he [or she] is influencing." This places the practitioner on two horns of a dilemma: (1)

any attempt to change is in itself a change and thereby a manipulation, no matter how slight, and (2) there

exists no formula or method to structure a change situation so that such manipulation can be totally absent.

To attack the first aspect of the dilemma, Kelman stressed freedom of choice, seeing any action that limits

freedom of choice as being ethically ambiguous or worse. To address the second aspect, Kelman argued

that the 00 practitioner must remain keenly aware of her or his own value system and alert to the possibility

that those values are being imposed on a client. In other words, an effective way to resolve this dilemma is

to make the change effort as open as possible, with the free consent and knowledge of the individuals

involved.

The second facet of coercion that can pose ethical dilemmas for the helping relationship involves

dependency. Helping relationships invariably create dependency between those who need help and those

who provide it, A major goal in OD is to lessen clients' dependency on consultants by helping clients gain

the knowledge and skills to address organizational problems and manage change themselves. In some cases,

however, achieving independence from OD practitioners can result in clients being either counter

dependent or over dependent, especially in the early stages of the relationship. To resolve dependency

issues, consultants can openly and explicitly discuss with the client how to handle the dependency problem,

especially what the client and consultant expect of one another. Another approach is to focus on problem

finding. Usually, the client is looking for a solution to a perceived problem. The consultant can redirect the

energy to improved joint diagnosis so that both are working on problem identification and problem

solving. Such action moves the energy of the client away from dependency. Finally, dependency can be

reduced by changing the client's expectation from being helped or controlled by the practitioner to a greater

focus on the need to manage the problem. Such a refocusing can reinforce the understanding that the

consultant is working for the client and offering assistance that is at the client's discretion.

Value and Goal Conflict: This ethical conflict occurs when the purpose of the change effort is not clear

or when the client and the practitioner disagree over how to achieve the goals. The important practical

issue for OD consultants is whether it is justifiable to withhold services unilaterally from an organization

that does not agree with their values or methods. OD pioneer Gordon Lippitt suggested that the real

question is the following: assuming that some kind of change is going to occur anyway, doesn't the con-

sultant have a responsibility to try to guide the change in the most constructive fashion possible? That

question may be of greater importance and relevance to an internal consultant or to a consultant who

already has an ongoing relationship with the client.

Argyris takes an even stronger stand, maintaining that the responsibilities of professional OD practitioners

to clients are comparable to those of lawyers or physicians, who, in principle, may not refuse to perform

their services. He suggests that the very least the consultant can do is to provide "first aid" to the

organization, as long as the assistance does not compromise the consultant's values. Argyris suggests that if

the Ku Klux Klan asked for assistance and the consultant could at least determine whether the KKK was

genuinely interested in assessing itself and willing to commit itself to all that a valid assessment would entail

concerning both itself and other groups, the consultant should be willing to help. If later the Klan's

objectives proved to be less than honestly stated, the consultant would be free to withdraw without being

compromised.

Technical Ineptness: This final ethical dilemma occurs when OD practitioners try to implement inter-

ventions for which they are not skilled or when the client attempts a change for which it is not ready.

Critical to the success of any OD program is the selection of an appropriate intervention, which depends,

in turn, on careful diagnosis of the organization. Selecting an intervention is closely related to the

practitioner's own values, skills, and abilities. In solving organizational problems, many OD consultants

emphasize a favorite intervention or technique, such as team building, total quality management, or self-

managed teams. They let their own values and beliefs dictate the change method, Technical ineptness

dilemmas also can occur when interventions do not align with the ability of the organization to implement

them. Again, careful diagnosis can reveal the extent to which the organization is ready to make a change

and possesses the skills and knowledge to implement an ethical dilemma that arises frequently in OD con-

Organization Development MGMT 628

sulting. What points in the process represent practical opportunities to intervene? Do you agree with

Kindred's resolution to the problem? What other options did she have?

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