Ethical Dilemmas Faced by Human Resource Professionals: Exploring Courses of Action

Beatriz Maria Braga, Edson Keyso de Miranda Kubo and Eduardo Oliva

RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration), 2017, vol. 21, issue 6, 832-850

Abstract: Although the topic concerning the role that the HR area and professionals have to play in ethical issues is gaining prominence in the international literature, there are still few studies on this topic in Brazil (Santos, Mendonça, & Demo, 2015). From a qualitative research conducted with 23 HR managers of national and international companies, this study investigated HR professionals’ perceptions about their role in the ethical issues concerning people management, the dilemmas they deal with and their conduct when confronted with these dilemmas. As for findings, most respondents understand their role to be business partners, and that people have value mainly because they contribute to organizational performance. Furthermore, HR professionals believe that they play an important role in reconciling the often conflicting goals of organizations and employees. They reported that they feel pressured by ethical dilemmas that relate to the information to which they have access, to the performance of their HR functions and to their specialist/consultant role. In addition, they feel they are the guardians of ethics in organizations and, because of this, they must set the example for the other areas. Results show the specific aspects related to HR professionals’ decision making, in that different factors determine their courses of action.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://rac.anpad.org.br/index.php/rac/article/view/1247/1243 (text/html)
https://rac.anpad.org.br/index.php/rac/article/download/1247/1243 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:abg:anprac:v:21:y:2017:i:6:1247

Access Statistics for this article

RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration) is currently edited by Marcelo de Souza Bispo

More articles in RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration) from ANPAD - Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Information Technology of ANPAD ().