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The Lack of Training and the Unethical Behavior

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-The Lack of Training and the Unethical Behavior In public administration, the main and the largest goal is to create public value in a form of transparency and trust between the public servants and the citizens. In order to achieve this targeted value, public administrator shall maintain ethical conduct throughout his decision-making and performance. Therefore, public officials are expected to develop reliable ethical competence. Understanding or judging ethics problems is a matter of subjective preference. Even if the organization has codes of ethics, integrity standards will remain limited. Moreover, forcing codes of ethics may lead to another problem, which is the agentic shift and “willful obedience” when an official repudiates …show more content…

This set of skills encourages the ability to take a position in any problem and to defend or oppose any anticipated decision and its “ethical justification.” Fourth, the self-awareness and consensus -building set of skills, which is an important component of public officials training to improve the ethical competence, is the ability to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their positions. This recognition should be linked with the authority’s positions and decisions that might be taken. The fifth skill is the subject-matter knowledge. Officials must have enough knowledge about the ethics standards that applies to their specific role as well as the ethic standards of their organization in general along with the legal, political, and cultural justification. All of theses mandates must be balanced together in the officials’ considerations. Finally, public officials are expected to have an attitude and rational commitment to standards. Such commitment can be learned, but can be more absorbed by practice. (Whitton 2009, 240-242) However, some public officials may conduct unethical behavior despite of their ethical competence training. Some well-trained officials may “choose not to act in accordance with their training. They fail to act ethically in some instance as expected, because in particular cases, officials lack the skill of dealing with “moral context”. Accordingly, the problem of unethical

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