Ethics Auditing and Conflict Analysis as Management Tools

In the age of intellectual capital, the most valuable part of jobs has become the essentially human tasks: sensing, judging, creating, and building relationships. Far from being alienated from the tools of his trade and the fruit of this labour, the knowledge worker carries them between his ears. (Stewart, 1997) This paper deals with management tools like conflict analysis and ethics auditing. Ethics auditing is understood as an opportunity and agreement to devise a system to inform on ethical corporate behaviour. This system essentially aims to increase the transparency and credibility of a company’s commitment to ethics. At the same time, the process of elaborating this system allows us to introduce the moral dimension into the company’s actions and decisions, thereby completing a key dimension of the production, maintenance and development of trust capital. Conflicts in organizations are directly or indirectly caused by violation of ethical principles. Both conflict analysis and ethics auditing help to lower the number of conflicts. In the first chapter we give an overview of different ethical management instruments. In the next chapters the ethics auditing process and conflict analysis as a management tool are described. Also their use in managing organizations plus raising levels of motivation and effectiveness is shown