Ethical Reflection in Weighing Your Personal Interests

¶ … ethical reflection in weighing your personal interests against the objective responsibilities of your administrative role. Then, describe the ethical dilemma you selected, and include whether it represents conflict of authority, interest, or roles and explain why.

Administrative responsibility and conflict

Administrators are objectively responsible for the actions of their subordinates, and for the actions of the organization as a whole (Cooper 2012: 73). Public administrators have additional responsibilities to their constituents, the taxpayers and to the law itself. Unfortunately, these diverse responsibilities can conflict. Additionally, perceptions of responsibility of the individual administrator, based upon his or her own personal code of conduct, can be subjective. Given this myriad, diverse responsibilities, it is rare when all cohere and point the administrator down a specific course.

One conflict occurred when an individual in my department was clearly overwhelmed by her family and personal responsibilities to the point where it was impacting her work and her ability to serve her clients. I knew that her health was compromised, and she was responsible for taking care of an elderly relative at home. She frequently came to work late. While she had a good excuse, and I knew that she had few resources on which to fall back upon, I also was aware of the fact that it was affecting her ability to do her job. As an administrator, I knew I had to 'take her to task' for her performance; as a human being I understood what she was going through. Additionally, I also knew, from observing the quality of her work over time that these difficulties were not characteristic of her usual level of performance.

I was under pressure from my own superiors to vigorously enforce standards regarding coming to work on time and to generally improve the quality of service. I solved the conflict by talking to her and explaining to her the need to delegate responsibilities at work when she was overcommitted at home. I also talked to her about family leave policy and part-time options. We were able to reduce her hours and enable her to use her vacation time to enable her to get her life back on track. However, this is an example of how an administrator's responsibilities to the organization can conflict with his or her sense of personal loyalty.