Ethics in human resource management: a study on ethical perceptions of HRM practices

• Autor(a) principal: Pimenta, Margarida
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/11294
• topic: Ethics; Human resource management (HRM); Individual ethics; Ethical infrastructures (EIS); Ética; Gestão de recursos humanos (GRH); Ética individual; Infraestruturas éticas (IEE)

The present research attempts to explore the way ethical challenges in Human Resources Management are perceived by HR professionals, to understand how ethical infrastructures and their relevance are associated with the individual ethical judgment and, lastly, to create a measurement tool for the ethical acceptability of dubious HRM practices. A newly-created questionnaire was filled by employees from several Portuguese companies (N=146), who had to assess their organizations’ ethical infrastructures and rate a list of ethically-dubious HRM practice examples. The results of this exploratory study support the hypothesis that the higher the relevance of ethical infrastructures, the less prone employees are to accept ethically questionable practices of Favoring of Power and practices of Discrimination. Results also suggest that the mere existence of ethical infrastructures is not a predictor of less acceptance of ethically dubious practices. These results suggest that the existence of solid ethical infrastructures that are complemented with proper informal systems to assure their relevance may be considered a contextual determinant of the organizational members’ ethics.