Creating Effective Organizations
What We Cover
 Eric Abrahamson Professor of Management |
This course explores how business executives can Creating Ethical Organizations. That is, assuming a set of values, how does one organize around these values to enhance the likelihood that they will be lived by in the company that espouses these values. Reading accounts of white-collar crimes in the papers, we concur that we would do the right thing if we were in their place. Unfortunately, organizational life complicates this moral. Fast growth, high turnover and rapidly changing environments - common factors of organizational life in many industries today - make it hard to discern the right course of action. In organizations with strong cultures, it is often difficult to voice concerns when personal definitions of "the right thing" conflict with commonly accepted company, professional or industry practice. Organizational boundaries and hierarchies make it hard to determine whose responsibility it is to act.
Fortunately, however, there are organizational tools that managers can use to make it easier to detect potential conflicts of interest, discourage them from happening and address them before they get out of hand. In this course, we focus on these tools and how one can use them at different levels of an organization.
Why It Matters
Most of our students will find themselves or their coworkers, superiors or subordinates faced with a conflict of interest at some point in their career.
What Students Learn
Students get a chance to listen to and ask questions of a guest speaker who did time for money laundering and wire fraud; we analyze his crime in depth from an organizational point of view. Generalizing from this case, we discuss measures available to people who may find themselves ? or their coworkers, subordinates or superiors ? faced with a conflict of interest and the temptation to commit white-collar crimes.