Team work and professional rights

This video is about team work and rights of professional working in different organizations. Topics like ethical corporate climate, loyalty and collegiality, respect for authority, professional rights, employee rights: sexual harassment, non discrimination, affirmative actions, privacy rights, right to equal opportunity etc are discussed

1. Team Work and Professional Rights Atiq ur Rehman

2. Summary Ethical Corporate Climate Loyalty and Collegiality Respect for Authority Professional Rights Privacy Rights Right to Equal Opportunity

3. Ethical Corporate Climate An ethical climate is a working environment that is conducive to morally responsible conduct. Within corporations it is produced by a combination of formal organization and policies, informal traditions and practices, and personal attitudes and commitments. Defining features of an ethical corporate climate; First, ethical values in their full complexity are widely acknowledged and appreciated by managers and employees alike. Second, the use of ethical language is honestly applied and recognized as a legitimate part of corporate dialogue. Third, top management sets a moral tone in words, in policies, and by personal example. Fourth, there are procedures for conflict resolution.

4. Loyalty and Collegiality Agency-loyalty is acting to fulfill one’s contractual duties to an employer. Attitude-loyalty is related with attitudes, emotions, and a sense of personal identity as it does with actions. Collegiality cite acts that constitute disloyalty. More precisely it includes; Respect for colleagues, valuing their professional expertise and their devotion to the social goods promoted by the profession. Commitment, in the sense of sharing a devotion to the moral ideals inherent in one’s profession. Connectedness, or awareness of participating in cooperative projects based on shared commitments and mutual support.

5. Respect for Authority Clear lines of authority provide a means for identifying areas of personal responsibility and accountability. Executive authority is the corporate or institutional right given to a person to exercise power based on the resources of an organization. Expert authority is the possession of special knowledge, skill, or competence to perform some task or to give sound advice. There are wide variations in how engineers and managers relate to each other. Engineer-oriented companies focus primarily on the quality of products. Customer-oriented companies make their priority the satisfaction of customers. Finance-oriented companies make profit the primary focus.

6. Professional Rights Engineers have several types of moral rights like human, employee, contractual, and professional rights. As humans , engineers have fundamental rights to live and freely pursue their legitimate interests, rights not to be unfairly discriminated against in employment on the basis of sex, race, or age. As employees , engineers have special rights, including the right to receive one’s salary in return for performing one’s duties and the right to engage in the nonwork political activities of one’s choosing without reprisal or coercion from employers. As professionals , engineers have special rights that arise from their professional role and the obligations it involves. Three professional rights are essential (1) The basic right of professional conscience (2) right of conscientious refusal and (3) right of professional recognition.

7. Professional Rights: Professional conscience It is the moral right to exercise professional judgment in pursuing professional responsibilities. One is to proceed gradually by reiterating the justifications given for the specific professional duties. The second way is to justify the right of professional conscience from ethical theories. Duty ethics regards professional rights as implied by general duties to respect persons. Rule-utilitarianism would emphasize the public good of allowing engineers to pursue their professional duties. Rights ethics would justify the right of professional conscience by reference to the rights of the public not to be harmed and the right to be warned of dangers from the “social experiments” of technological innovation.

8. Professional Rights: Conscientious Refusal The right of conscientious refusal is the right to refuse to engage in unethical behavior and to refuse to do so solely because one views it as unethical. (1) Where there is widely shared agreement in the profession as to whether an act is unethical. (2) Where there is room for disagreement among reasonable people over whether an act is unethical.

9. Professional Rights: Recognition Engineers have a right of professional recognition for their work and accomplishments. Part of this involves fair monetary remuneration, and part nonmonetary forms of recognition. what a reasonable salary is or what a fair remuneration for patent discoveries is? Such detailed matters must be worked out cooperatively between employers and employees, for they depend on both the resources of a company and the bargaining position of engineers.

10. Employee Rights: Employee rights are any rights, moral or legal, that involve the status of being an employee. They overlap with some professional rights. However, here we will focus on human rights that exist even if unrecognized by specific contract arrangements. Privacy rights Rights to equal opportunity Preventing Sexual Harassment Nondiscrimination Affirmative Action

11. Privacy Rights The right to pursue outside activities can be thought of as a right to personal privacy in the sense that it means the right to have a private life off the job. In speaking of the right to privacy here, however, we mean the right to control the access to and the use of information about oneself. As with the right to outside activities, this right is limited in certain instances by employers rights, but even then who among employers has access to confidential information is restricted. For example, the personnel division needs medical and life insurance information about employees, but immediate supervisors usually do not.

12. Right to Equal Opportunity: Nondiscrimination Discrimination due to one’s gender, race, skin color, age, or political or religious outlook. Such discrimination that is, morally unjustified treatment of people on arbitrary or irrelevant grounds is especially pernicious within the work environment, for work is itself fundamental to a person’s self image.

13. Right to Equal Opportunity: Affirmative Action Affirmative action, as the expression is usually defined, is giving a preference or advantage to a member of a group that in the past was denied equal treatment, in particular, women and minorities. The weak form of preferential treatment consists in hiring a woman or a member of a minority over an equally qualified white male. The strong form , by contrast, consists in giving preference to women or minorities over better-qualified white males. Can such preferences, either in the weak or strong form, ever be justified morally (as distinct from legally)? There are strong arguments on both sides of the issue.

14. Right to Equal Opportunity: Sexual Harassment It is the unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of unequal power. It takes two main forms: quid pro quo and hostile work environment . Quid pro quo includes cases where supervisors require sexual favors as a condition for some employment benefit (a job, promotion, or raise). It can take the form of a sexual threat (of harm) or sexual offer (of a benefit in return for a benefit). Hostile work environment is any sexually oriented aspect of the workplace that threatens employees’ rights to equal opportunity. It includes unwanted sexual proposals, lewd remarks, sexual leering, posting nude photos, and inappropriate physical contact.

15. Right to Equal Opportunity: Sexual Harassment Sexual harassment is a display of power and aggression through sexual means. Accordingly, it has appropriately been called “dominance eroticized.” Thus a duty ethicist would condemn it as violating the duty to treat people with respect, to treat them as having dignity and not merely as means to personal aggrandizement and gratification of one’s sexual and power interests. A rights ethicist would see it as a serious violation of the human right to pursue one’s work free from the pressures, fears, penalties, and insults that typically accompany sexual harassment. And a utilitarian would emphasize the impact it has on the victim’s happiness and self- fulfillment, and on women in general. This also applies to men who experience sexual harassment.

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