What would you do if you witnessed a workplace crime or ethics infraction? Companies worry about this all the time -- they don't take employees' honesty for granted, and they sometimes implement very expensive policies and technology to catch people misbehaving.
But we have good news for them: U.S. employees have are mostly quite trustworthy when it comes to common concerns like theft -- more trustworthy, perhaps, than you might expect. Here are the results of Monster's Worker-Integrity Survey:
We asked, "If you knew a colleague had embezzled a small amount of money, what would you do?" And 85 percent of respondents said they'd turn that colleague in (70 percent would do it because "stealing is wrong"; the other 15 percent just didn't want to risk being perceived as an accomplice). Ten percent said they would turn a blind eye (3 percent said this was because they didn't want to be called a snitch, while 7 percent said it was more a matter of the issue being "none of my concern"). A small minority -- five percent -- would base their decision on whether they liked the colleague in question.
We asked, "How much company property (office supplies, etc.) is it OK to take home per month?" And 66 percent said none -- that "even a paperclip is stealing" -- however, a full 4 percent did say that they think pretty much all company property can rightly be taken home -- that is, "if it's not nailed down, it's up for grabs." Of the rest, 26 percent said $1 to $10 dollars' worth per year (a few pens here and there) was OK, while 4% were in the $11-to-$75-dollars'-worth-per-year range.
And we asked, "If you had proof that a work friend was promoted because he or she was having a secret affair with a manager, would you report it to HR?" And it seems that relationships might make "right" and "wrong" a bit more ambiguous for people: 50 percent of respondents answered with an unequivocal "Yes," while 18 percent were firmly in the "No" camp. The rest were on the fence, saying it depended on whether the promotion affected their own career path.
What do you think of these results? Are any of the numbers higher or lower than you would've expected? Join the conversation in the Comments section, or find us on Twitter or Facebook to share your thoughts.
Share this post: Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834515e7c69e2014e886a5d55970d
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference What Would You Do? Monster's Worker-Integrity Survey.:
No comments:
Post a Comment