MHRM 6120 • Blog Data Management and Ethics

Ethics and data management are the topics of conversation this week in grad school. We’re asked to think about what we would do if someone with whom we worked asked us to manipulate data for the “benefit of the organization” and whether our response would differ if a superior asked us to do it.

Working in Marketing, the opportunity to present manipulated data is always available. We print annual reports for our health system as well as our cancer treatment center. It’s tempting to tweak the data to paint the organization in a better light, isn’t it? Fortunately, my manager doesn’t believe in doing anything unethical like this. We present the data – both good and bad – as it is.

Sure, we might try and powder the pig, Accentuate the positive and not draw attention to the negative. But at the end of the day, the information, she’s still a pig, and it’s a pig the public will see.

It’s so hard to say no when it’s a manager asking you, though. I had a co-worker call me a few years ago. She was upset because it was time to do the employee survey and her manager had taken her survey forms from her so that the staff could not write anything bad about the department. Talk about skewing the data! This manager would rather have no data for their department than have something bad out there.

The employee was too intimidated to do anything about it and I wanted to help her, so I called human resources and explained the problem. The next day the department had a visit from the Human Resources Director. She came over for a “friendly visit” to remind everyone that the employee survey had begun and she expected 100% participation! Now the manager had no choice but to pass the forms out.

But how dare she put my friend in such an awkward position? I wondered how I would’ve reacted in the same situation. I like to think I would’ve stood up to my manager and passed out the forms, but I can’t really say. I do know I believe that misrepresenting data doesn’t really help the organization, or anyone for that matter, at all. 

Lies, they always catch up with you and dealing with an ethics scandal is a lot harder than any other controversy. It’s like I said last week, trust is one of the hardest things to win back once you’ve lost it. That’s why it’s always better to be honest in the first place.