Here’s the scenario: you spot a colleague doing something unethical or even illegal. What would you do?

One in six Kiwi workers has been in just this situation, says Jane Arnott, an adjunct research fellow with the University’s Brian Picot Chair in Ethical Leadership—Aritahi and the director of the Ethics Conversation.

The finding is from an international survey on workplace ethics covering 13 countries and 10,000 employees. The Brian Picot Chair in Ethical Leadership funds the New Zealand arm of the survey, which is run by the London-based Institute of Business Ethics.

Results tell us most New Zealand staff who witnessed some wrongdoing in the workplace spoke up about it—61 percent said they’d flagged the matter with management or through other means.

So why didn’t everyone? Fearing they might jeopardise their job, or that no action would be taken, were the main reasons others remained silent, Jane says.

Survey results suggest those fears weren’t entirely unfounded.

As many as 41 percent of employees who raised concerns about misconduct said they’d experienced retaliation as a result.

A significant proportion of workers (29 percent) also believed their manager rewarded staff even if a person had used ethically questionable practices.

Rocking the boat

Jane believes the willingness of staff to call out questionable behaviour is unlikely to change unless speaking up is normalised.

“It takes a lot of courage to speak up,” she says.

Workplace culture and a ‘don’t rock the boat’ mindset are a large part of the problem, she argues. While more companies are producing corporate ethics policies, these can be a ‘tick-box’ exercise and are no quick fix.

Seven out of 10 New Zealand staff in the survey said their workplace had written standards of ethical conduct. Despite this, results revealed a degree of pessimism among workers about stamping out unethical behaviour.

Close to half (46 percent) agreed with the statement that “minor breaches of the rules are inevitable in a modern organisation”.

Just over a third agreed that “if we cracked down on every minor breach of the rules, we would soon find we had no staff”.

Kiwi workers weren’t alone in their pessimism. The Institute of Business Ethics found similar views across the 13 countries included in the research.

The survey will be run again in 2024 to track changes.

What employees think about rule breaches

Guide to the table: Data are from the 2021 Ethics at Work survey, published by the Institute of Business Ethics; 750 working adults (aged 18+) were surveyed in each of the 13 countries included in the research.