Professional Values, Ethics, and Career Success
All members of an organization showing the same values create an important tool for judgment making, assessing probable outcomes of contemplated actions, and choosing among alternatives. Values and ethics are essential to understand how a person or organization can be successful in seeking an education and a career. Values are ideas about the worth or importance of things, concepts, and people. Values could be the policy in how we create decisions concerning accuracy and inaccuracy. Ethics are the principles, or standards that guide professionals to do the right thing. Ethics is somewhat made up of what an employee or employer should do in his or her place of employment. Considering and implementing values and ethics in day-to-day practices will show strength of character to encourage ones accomplishments in his or her academic and professional career.
Three sources of professional values and ethics are: Integrity, Respect, and Responsibility. They are the embodiment of what an organization stands for, and should be the basis for the behavior of its members (O’Brian, 2002) whereas ethics are the principles, or standards consistent with helping professionals realize what is considered to be right or wrong. Integrity is the one imperative value someone could be able to build up that will improve in his or her career. Acquiring integrity means being honest as well as straightforward. A strong case to illustrate integrity in the academic arena is the case of students using resources to complete a homework task aside from their own research and work, causing them to be in violation of the honor code (Jeffrey Pfeffer, 2003, Teaching the Wrong Lesson). Violation of the honor code, when dealing with values and ethics, can have severe consequences, like suspension from a university for plagiarism, or a prison term in the business world. Instance of a lack of values and ethics in the business would be the Enron debacle...