Consequences of Unethical Behavior in An Organization: Rajani J Nair - CAP-HR - Roll No: - 2019B1PGPMX025

Unethical behavior at an organization can have serious consequences. One employee, Mr. X, was terminated for breaching ethical standards. He had been taking on development work directly from the client without going through proper channels and was paid separately. An audit discovered code and requests being transferred without approval. Mr. X's living standards had risen, indicating an outside source of income. His termination served as a lesson to others about following ethical practices and organizations ensuring high performers feel properly valued to avoid similar situations.

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Consequences of Unethical Behavior in An Organization: Rajani J Nair - CAP-HR - Roll No: - 2019B1PGPMX025

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Rajani Nair (PGPMX-2019 Batch 1)

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Consequences of unethical

behavior in an organization
Rajani J Nair | CAP-HR | Roll No: - 2019B1PGPMX025
In a world full of intense competition when the only goal of a person is to move ahead in
life and make more money in such a situation it becomes very difficult for a person to
conclude if his actions are ethical or not. In an organization the ethical laws can vary from
industry to industry or company to company. The reason for a person to not follow the
ethical laws set by his company can be due to multiple factors. The following incident that
I am going to mention was of one of my very close colleagues who had to face a very major
action due to his unethical behavior in my previous organization.

It was normal Wednesday morning at our office ODC (Offshore development center) and
everyone had started their day at work as usual. It was around 12 noon when our project
HR walked in welcoming everyone with her normal sweet smile. Everyone started
wondering that its neither fun Friday day nor any special festival occasion & nor it was the
time of distributing appraisal letters then what is the purpose behind the HR’s surprise
visit. We all continued our work as usual, went for our lunch break as a group followed by
our normal 15 mins group gossiping walk post lunch in our campus surrounding. It was
during our walk time, one of my colleagues Mr. X received a call from our project manager
to report to office immediately as there is some urgent work. After receiving the call Mr. X
rushed back to office immediately and we continued our walk as usual. After 15 mins when
we all had returned back to our desks we saw that Mr. X, our project manager and our HR
was in some serious discussion inside the meeting room. We all thought that it was
definitely something related to either Mr. X’s promotion or of some on-site opportunity as
he was one of the client’s most favorite go to person for any kind of assistance. We had
already started making plans of how to ask him for as party for the good news he will be
sharing once he is out of the meeting room. Few minutes passed by and after almost 1
hour Mr.X walked out of the meeting room with a very gloomy face and started packing all
his stuff. We all were surprised for a moment and then we started going towards his desk
and started enquiring why is he packing his stuff and we all were shocked from his one
liner reply, all he said was “I am terminated & today is my last day at work.” As soon as he
uttered that sentence, we all started laughing saying “Go & fool someone else” thinking
that this is his usual sarcastic jokes which he cracks all the time but as time passed by, we
realized that what he said was indeed true & without even giving a proper farewell he was
out of the office in the next 1 hour.

What happened in front of our eyes was very difficult to digest and I was especially totally
in shock as he was one of my very closest friends. I started continuously calling him to
know what happened but he was not receiving the calls. Seeing the entire team’s condition
our project manager was considerate enough to immediately schedule a team meeting
along with the HR as he felt that it was important for all of us to know the reason behind
our colleague’s termination. We were all called to assemble at the conference room and
the meeting commenced with our PM announcing that what we heard is indeed true and
that our colleague was terminated as he had breached one of the ethical laws of our
organization. He then asked our HR to let us know everything in detail so that each one of
us are aware of the consequences of our own actions in the organization. To begin with,

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our team comprised of 23 members including the PM who was part of providing L3 level
support to a foreign client. In a month we used to receive all kind of development requests
in which we had to frequently interact with our client to understand the requirements.
Mr. X was one of the most sought-after people by the client for major development
requirements. Our billing was in the form per hour per resource which was approximately
38$ /day per resource. Our organization used to earn a lot of revenue from our project as
there were continuously new requirements flowing in and the entire team of 23 members
were billable. When the HR started reveling the details she mentioned that all of a sudden
our organization started observing that the new requirements had started getting reduced
which our team had also internally discussed it casually however when they started
digging deep with the help of some insider in the client’s office our company had found
that the client was getting this work done without the help of our team members and just
for the sake of keeping the contract they were providing us some minor requests. As we
had got this information the security team had already started keeping a tab on our
activities without our knowledge and it was during one of the recent company’s audit
processes wherein it was identified that there were many requests & many lines of code
that was transferred to the client’s environment without following the proper deployment
process. That’s when the organization found out that it was all being transferred from Mr.
X’s system and he had been approached by the client separately where was being paid a
hefty amount to get all the major development work done. To be honest we all somewhere
knew that all of a sudden Mr. X’s standard of living had increased but it never stroked me
even once that the source of income was through this way.

After hearing the reason of his termination, we all learnt a very big lesson on the
consequences of not being ethical in an organization. Mr X might have had many reasons
to do what he had done for eg:-he was in very bad shape economically, he was constantly
being demoralized by his seniors in spite of performing so well in the organization but
when the time came and the client appreciated him although in a crooked way he got
easily moved without even thinking that if his actions are ethical or not because what he
expected from the organization he got a better deal form the client & he chose to accept
the non-ethical path. This incident was a learning for each one of us as well as the
organization as it made everyone be very cautious of their actions & with regards to the
organization it ensured that the hard-working resources are given their due credit &
importance so that they do not have to face one more situation of losing out to such a
huge client.

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