Professional ethics require that an individual maintains his/her integrity at all times under all circumstances. When an individual is committed to upholding personal integrity he/she will always make decisions which are ethically correct, unbiased and aimed at achievement of the greater good. Ethical conducts requires an adherence to rules and regulation. Adhering to professional ethics is a formidable task; often people come across situations where it is difficult to uphold ones commitment to ethical conduct.
The dilemma over using ethical or unethical means to achieve a certain task is most apparent among employees who handle frontline sales since some people tend to succumb to the lure of adopting unethical means such as misrepresentation in order to achieve their target and earn incentives. Reputation and rewards gained through unethical means almost always gets nullified since practices such as misrepresentation lead to ill feelings and loss of trust, they bring about adverse consequences in long run.
Even during a job interview an individual may face a dilemma when confronted with a question that may uncover his past failures, in these situation being ethical may almost certainly lead to a negative consequence and employment of unethical means may yield success, however problems may arise later when the unethical conduct is discovered thereby leading to a dire consequence.
In most cases adhering strictly to ethics under all circumstances is the best policy however under some dicey situations one may adopt a neutral stance since being neutral is better then being outright unethical because being unethical casts a negative image of a person’s character.