One of the signs of an unethical workplace is it is abusive - this was commonly reported in our survey and we have observed this on many occasions ourselves. We witnessed supervisors yelling and swearing at staff members, threats to beat up a co-worker, reports of employees who physically assaulted other workers. This isn't limited to reservations. Corporate boardrooms also have their share of bullies, abusers and sexual harassers. Says Dr. De Mars,
"I worked for a very large corporation where all of the professionals had a name plate outside the door with their first two initials and last name. We had one top executive who would practically throw a tantrum when anyone disagreed with him. Well, I was young and new to the company, plus, I had all the numbers to show that we needed to hire more people. This particular man didn't want to go over budget but he wanted to do all the work as scheduled. I told him it was not possible. He yelled, threatened to fire me and called me 'God damn AnnMaria' so many times that when I got back to my office, as a joke, someone had taped the initials "G.D." next to my name. The company ended up having major problems. Many of the top executives (including that one) were fired. Some went to jail for misuse of government funds."
Abusive = Fear = Silent By-standers
We believe people when they tell us,
"If I report the unethical behavior at work, I am going to get fired and someone else is going to have my job, while the same problems go on."
In unethical organizations, people are afraid to report problems. If the project director has screamed at you in a staff meeting that your funding requires having served 45 families this year and your records only show 12. The next week, Tammy comes into the staff meeting and she has added six more families. You know that Tammy just had several relatives come in one morning and fill out forms, then took the rest of the afternoon off to go to Wal-Mart. The project director turns to you sneering and asks why you can't ever seem to get more than one new family a month. It doesn't take long to get the picture that you better come up with some names for your records, whether they actually get any services or not.
Would you do the same yourself the next week? What if you were Tammy's supervisor and you knew this is what she did, but now your boss is happy with you and the next week's staff meeting praises you, holds you up as an example to others and says, "This is the kind of behavior I expect. She made a major improvement in the number of clients on her caseload this week."
What WOULD you do?