Achieving Ethics and Fairness in Hiring: Going Beyond the Law

Abstract

Since the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and more recent Federal legislation, managers, regulators, and attorneys have been busy in sorting out the legal meaning of fairness in employment. While ethical managers must follow the law in their hiring practices, they cannot be satisfied with legal compliance. In this article, we first briefly summarize what the law requires in terms of fair hiring practices. We subsequently rely on multiple perspectives to explore the ethical meaning of fairness in hiring. Ethical fairness underlies the law and regulations in this area, but goes beyond them as well. We conclude by demonstrating that ethical hiring practices enable managers to make better hiring decisions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006Ethics, Fairness, Personnel Law, Staffing,

Modeling Diversity Management Practices in Corporate Ethics: The Spillover Effect

“…Recognizing the limitations from fragmenting workplace diversity research into either an ethical or a business view, researchers have made repeated calls for empirical studies that integrate the business case for diversity with its moral imperative (Alder & Gilbert, 2006;Gilbert et al, 1999;van Dijk, et al, 2012;Yang & Konrad, 2011). This study first responds to such calls by articulating and testing for a spillover effect from diversity management to corporate ethical practices, but also by suggesting that the integration of these two initiatives could maximize firm-level financial outcomes.…”

“…Along with being an antecedent, diversity management shares similarities with ethical practices. They are both based on various principles of ethics (Alder & Gilbert, 2006). The rest of chapter 2 presents the hypotheses that develop the above linkages beginning with the theoretical model in Figure 2.3.…”

“…propositions that had not been investigated empirically (e.g., Alder & Gilbert, 2006;Gilbert et al, 1999;van Dijk, et al, 2012). This study was motivated not only by this dearth of empirical research linking diversity and ethics, but also by the lack of research on diversity management in general (Yang & Konrad, 2011).…”

“…The call for workplace diversity is often positioned either as a business necessity (Cox, 1993;Herring, 2009;Kochan et al, 2003), or as an issue of fundamental fairness, equity and morality (Alder & Gilbert, 2006;Brown et al, 2005;Gilbert, Stead & Ivancevich, 1999). The business case is that workplace diversity makes good business sense and bolsters a company's financial stance (Cox, 1993;Herring, 2009).…”

“…Corporate ethics captures the impact of a firm's external ethics and internal ethical functioning (Chun, Shin, Choi, & Kim, 2013;Kaptein, 2011). With the exception of one paper (i.e., Labelle, Gargouri, Francoeur, 2010), the ethical view has not been empirically investigated beyond conceptual propositions of an existing link between diversity practices and ethical considerations (e.g., Alder & Gilbert, 2006;Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005;Gilbert et al, 1999;van Dijk et al, 2012).…”