We have always been taught in various walks of our life to value ethics.  It starts from being being tutored at our homes by our parents and elders and at educational institutions by our teachers.  The same is taught through various mythological books saints and godmen.  However it comes to ethics in corporate world, the perception of ethics is totally different. Let us take for example of a official who worked for two different companies but in the same industry.  Let us take the example of the person having worked in two mobile service provider industries.

Example 1:- The employee works in Airtel.  The concerned employee is a high paid official getting a salary of rupees forty thousand per month. The employee has access to all information of his organization and as company policy is not supposed to disclose any information to his customers or competitors as leakage of the information could possibly harm the organization.  The organizations expectations of the employee is totally ethical, and becomes the employees duty to abide by company's ethics as the company takes care of him and his family by paying him salary.  Till this stage the company's requirement on the part of the employee is absolutely right.  The employees company has a further requirement from the employee that is to keep track of information from competitors and obtain data from them.  Here the company's policy is in the interests of further development but on moral front is unethical and from the employees point of view has has to do something against his conscience, on which was never taught to him in his childhood.  The employee fulfils the entire requirement of the company as he is duty bound to the company.

Example 2:- The employee gets a better offer of  from Vodafone a salary of 60000.  The employee has to accept the offer keeping his own future and the family's future in mind.  Here Vodafone too expects the employee to be loyal to them and maintain confidentiality.  However they also require the employee to share some secrets about the previous company he worked for.  It becomes tricky for the employee as it is not ethical to disclose information of the previous company as they looked after him and his family by offering remuneration.  At the same time he has to disclose information to the new company as he is currently paid by them.

Going by the above it needs to be accepted that while we are expected to follow ethics in general in our day to day lives, some flexibility is required of us in certain fields as what is wrong in general need not always be wrong.

Regards

Satish