Ruminations

Are Social Networkers Less Ethical?

A lot of attention was devoted last week to the “whistle-blower” findings in the Ethics Resource Center’s biennial National Business Ethics Survey, but the survey has prompted another vein of analysis that I find equally provocative.  On Monday, cmswire.com posted a summary under the headline “Report Shows Questionable Ethics With Social Networkers.”  The story reports that “social networkers show a higher tolerance for activities that could be considered unethical.”

People who report spending at least 30 percent of their work day on various social network sites are classified as “active social networkers” in this survey.  Data show that active social networkers are far more likely than non-networkers to:

·      “friend” a client or customer;

·       take a copy of work software home and use it on a personal computer;

·      use social networking to find out what your company’s competitors are doing;

·      Buy personal items with the company credit card as long as you pay back the company;

·      Keep a copy of confidential work documents in case you need them in your next job;

·      Blog or tweet negatively about your company or colleagues. (However, the survey also found that social networkers are also more likely to blog or tweet positively than negatively, about said company or colleagues.)

So social networkers are less ethical… .? Really? The finding in the cmswire report that also piqued my interest was that 72 percent of social networkers saying they plan to change employers within the next five years, compared to 39 percent of non-networkers.  The subhead for this section of the writeup was “Detachment Disorder.”

Hmmm.  At universities we teach the so-called Millennials – people under 30 — and we’re learning a few things about their norms and values.  For example, their private and public lives are intricately blended; it’s how they’ve grown up. It’s understandable that they’d be OK with friending a client, taking software home, tweeting about co-workers, or finding work-related information on social networks.  When I think of unethical acts in the workplaces, I can think of far more heinous breaches than what appeared of this survey’s list (OK, with the exception of keeping confidential documents for your future use). 

And Millennials are well aware that staying with one career, let alone one employer, for several years, is highly unlikely.  (Many of them have had to witness their parents’ employment misfortunes).  So three out of four social networkers say they plan to change employers within the next five years? It’s the nature of this tumultuous economy.  Yet the subhead in the article calls this attitude a “disorder.”

I don’t want to make the mistake of lumping all social networkers into the Millennial age group.  There are more than a few X’ers, Y’ers and boomers, I suspect, whose use of facebook drags down productivity.  But I do think social networkers are, by and large, part of new kind of employee – mostly smart, and mostly ethical — whose values employers ignore at their own peril. 

What concerns me most today is that the cmswire writeup seems to view the survey findings as evidence of this new group’s ethical inferiority.  But the cmswire story did end with a positive suggestion: Managers can and should address ethics In the workplace.  My own research suggests that company policies and workplace culture are among the strongest influences upon individuals’ ethical decision-making.  Like every generation before them, the Millennials are perfectly capable of learning more about ethics — especially at the office.