Ethical Issues in Human Resource Management

Abstract

There is little mention of ethics in the current literature in the United Kingdom relating to either human resource management or personnel management. The term ‘ethics’ is hardly referred to in the most popular HRM/Personnel Management texts (Sisson, 1989 and 1994; Torrington and Hall, 1987; Towers, 1992); the word does not appear in any of the indexes. A recent United Kingdom text by Beardwell and Holden (1994) titled Human Resource Management: A Contemporary Perspective does explicitly refer to ethics in relation to management, learning and development and job design, but devotes no more than part of four pages (out of 687) to the issue. As far as business ethics textbooks are concerned human resource management is treated only narrowly (see Chryssides and Kaler, 1993; Donaldson, 1989). There is the occasional chapter on the workplace but where this is the case the discussion usually focuses on employee rights in general or on some novel situation such as an employer’s use of polygraph tests to access employee honesty (Beauchamp, 1989).

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