Indian employees unethical @ work

Bangalore: Call it 'ethical erosion'. Majority of the Indian employees have no qualm in finishing their personal work during the office hours. They are even ready to resort to any unethical means to get competitor information, says a workplace ethics survey released by staffing company Teamlease.

Almost 62 percent respondents would use any means to get competitor information, while 63 percent had no problem in doing personal work in office. The survey involved employees from India's top 500 companies across eight cities with a sample size of 401.

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The extent of the moral and ethical degradation among today's employees was more exposed when 62 percent of the respondents thought it was normal to bribe someone to get work done.

In the study, Kolkata emerged as a highly ethics-conscious city with an ethics index of 76 percent followed by Delhi at 53 percent while Ahmedabad scored the lowest (21 percent). A majority of the respondents in Bangalore did not mind taking unfair credit for subordinates' ideas. In the IT capital, an average of 70 percent of the respondents enjoyed indulging in gossip under the garb of networking. And also nearly 80 percent of respondents did not bat an eyelid when it came to carrying office stationery home. However, Bangaloreans felt that open lines of communication could keep unethical behavior at the workplace in check, as 33.33 percent were unaware of their own company's ethical policy.

The survey gave a more nasty jolt to the so called ethics when it revealed that over 50 percent of employees do not worry too much about fudging expenses reports, lying to take leave or using office resources for personal work like taking print outs or making photocopies.

According to Teamlease, the survey attempted to uncover the 'hidden truth' of Indian workplace ethics. "Companies are today getting better at defining non-negotiables but not interfering in trivia," said Surabhi Mathur, general manager, permanent staffing, TeamLease Services.

The study, commissioned by TeamLease Services, was conducted by research firm Synovate.