What role do personal ethics have in a business environment? Our personal ideas of right and wrong influence our actions, words, and thoughts. But how does that carry over into the work environment? After all, our employer is purchasing our time and energy. As employees, we feel a responsibility to follow the ethics that the owner or director has established for the business. However, a business owner has no control over or even input into your conduct outside the office.

But is this really true? Perhaps at one time this model applied to life in the United States, but the modern workplace is more complex. Today, off-the-job behavior, integrity, and honesty relate to on-the-job performance. For example, in the modern workplace, workers telecommute, working from home using technologies to connect electronically to office documents and meetings. In this newly expanded workplace, an employer may indeed care if an employee drinks at home during the workday or experiments with drugs recreationally. Corporate boards of directors may keep a close eye on the decisions their CEOs make in using social media. Tech CEO Greg Gopman posted a scathing rant on Facebook attacking the homeless population of San Francisco, painting an image of an elite, uncaring tech industry. The backlash had personal consequences, derailing his career, but also had impact on the growing disenchantment of long-term San Franciscans with the tech industry in general. The business environment is a changing landscape, and the lines of privacy laws are becoming blurred. Should employers have a say over an employee’s behavior outside the office if that behavior may affect the company for which the person works?

Likewise, stockholders (people who own stock in a company) and employees sometimes have a say over the behavior of management outside the office. A classic example is seen when Boeing was recovering from a set of scandals involving how it obtained military contracts.4 The aerospace leader fired its current CEO and hired a former Boeing employee, Harry C. Stonecipher, to lead the company back to stability. Fifteen months later, Stonecipher, who was married, was discovered having an affair with a female employee. The same code of ethical conduct that Stonecipher had created and pointed to as a sign of the return of ethical conduct at Boeing was used to force his resignation. There were no charges of sexual harassment, and the woman did not work directly for Stonecipher. He never showed her any favored treatment within Boeing. But there still was a conflict between his personal ethics and his role in the business. It took a great toll on him personally as well as the company he was working to restore.

What if you are asked to do something that conflicts with your understanding of ethical behavior? It can be challenging to decide whose ethics to follow, yours or your company’s, and each path has legal and moral consequences. For example, Andrea Malone* was ordered by the president of her company to fire an employee who had a brain tumor because the tumor had lowered the employee’s productivity.5 Andrea knew that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) covered such situations and that it was a violation of federal law to fire the employee under these conditions. However, her company insisted she fire the employee and say that it was for other reasons, not the tumor. Andrea chose to leave the company rather than fire the person unfairly, but she has since had difficulty finding another job. Andrea held to her personal ethics but was not properly prepared for the short-term consequences.

What if you find you are taking part in unethical activity without realizing that you were doing so? Before Bruce Forest* accepted a job offer as a human resources director, he asked the firm about rumors that they hired undocumented immigrants. He was assured that was no longer the case. However, soon after Bruce started to work for the company, he began receiving information that the illegal hiring was still going on at the company. Bruce’s boss ordered him not to investigate the situation, saying that the company would prefer the risk of being fined by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. According to his boss, the fine would be “an acceptable business expense.”6 So now Bruce was complicit in an illegal activity and had to make some tough decisions. Should he quit his job? Doing so might mean he would have to move his family, take a pay cut, and lose a bonus his company had promised him.

Mark Whitacre faced a situation similar to Bruce’s. Whitacre was a senior executive with the agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). For years, ADM was involved in a multinational price-fixing scheme. Price fixing occurs when a group of companies agree among themselves to set a product’s price artificially high so customers have to pay more than they should for the product. Whitacre was a participant in the illegal activities and was set to rise to the top of the organization. His wife, however, became increasingly conflicted with what was happening at ADM and with her own ethical values. She finally threatened to divorce Whitacre unless he found a way to end his involvement. Whitacre then went to the FBI and became the highest-level corporate executive in U.S. history to become a whistle-blower. He agreed to record secret meetings at ADM, ultimately capturing incriminating audiotape and videotape for the FBI over a three-year period.7 Whitacre himself ended up spending almost nine years in prison. He is now the chief operating officer of a biotech firm in California. The story is so compelling that it was made into a film starring Matt Damon—The Informant.

To stumble unknowingly into unethical and even illegal activity like Whitacre did puts people in a difficult situation, especially when their jobs are on the line. Although some people decide they will “be flexible” with their own ethical standards in the workplace, it can often take a toll on their mental state, relationships, and physical health.

How do I examine a company’s ethics? Some companies may have a written code of ethics, or a statement of their commitment to certain ethical practices. Also called a code of conduct, it is meant to give employees guidance on how to handle themselves in challenging ethical situations. Additionally, many companies have a public mission statement that defines the core purpose of the organization—why it exists. The mission statement describes the company’s values, goals, and aspirations. Consider the following mission statement of Fetzer Vineyards:

Our vision is to operate in a way that restores, revitalizes, and regenerates ecosystems and communities, while producing premium quality wines, advancing the health and well-being of employees, and producing sustainable growth for shareholders.8

This mission statement has led to a plan to be fully green by 2030, awards for the conservation of energy, and a company-wide English as a Second Language training program offered as part of its education package for its employees.

How can I find out the best and worst aspects of a company’s ethical conduct? In addition to a company’s code of ethics and mission statement, other resources allow you to evaluate the acts of a company and legal violations it may have committed. For example, you can check the legal compliance of a corporation by researching actual charges that have been filed or cases that have been adjudicated against a company. Websites such as lawcrawler.findlaw.com help you find relevant case law generated by lawsuits filed by or against many corporations.

There are also organizations, such as the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, that work with corporations to help them define, plan, and institute their corporate citizenship. This center also highlights companies that act in positive ways by publicizing responsible corporate activities and listing on its website reports in the general media of ethical issues in business. By doing so, the center works with companies to “leverage their assets to ensure both the company’s success and a more just and sustainable world.”9 We’ll discuss other ways you can assess a company’s ethics and sense of corporate responsibility in the next section.