ethics and compliance officer’s role in ‘healing’ organizational culture

Abstract

Last decades have strongly imposed in the public mind the importance of taking in to account the organizational life’s ethical dimension. If in the advanced states the terms of ethical management encouraging organizations to adopt compliance management programs, at ethical and legal level, are constituted in government strategies, in Romania these aspects are still little known. Today’s Romanian society largely reflects what does exist, happens or changes in the organizational space. The article sustains the idea of institutionalizing ethics in organizations as a way to making the society ‘moral draining’. Management specialists describe several ethics implementation strategies. We have chosen to dwell on the organizational culture changing strategy and creating a moral culture, focusing on the ethics and compliance officer’s role. Because managers are ‘products’ of the organizations that they lead, and their perceptions are influenced by the mental frame promoted by the organizational culture, it is difficult to make a correct diagnosis of the organization and to establish a strategy for change. Ethics and compliance officer, an occupation yet unknown by the Romanian trade nomenclature, is the person who works closely with the manager determining which are the organizational culture’s resorts; he or she is the one who, aiming organizational health, contributes to the development, the interpretation and the implementation of ethics policies and programs.