Asking the Clergy: How can faith promote ethical behavior in the workplace?

Faith offers guidance in many areas, from making decisions about personal behavior to interactions with family and friends. Faith brought into the workplace, however, can cause conflicts when co-workers don’t share the same beliefs. This week’s clergy discuss ways in which religion can have a positive effect at work.

Arthur Dobrin

Leader emeritus, Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island, Garden City

How faith can promote ethical behavior in the workplace seems self-evident if your faith promotes the values of self-respect, honesty, compassion and other virtues that make life better for each of us. Of course, not everyone understands faith this way.

For some, faith is an individual matter between one person and God. From the perspective of my humanist religion, this is too narrow a view of faith. In its broadest sense, faith should be the fuel that feeds a desire to be a better person, to live more fully in this world as a responsible person.

Faith isn’t reserved for special occasions but should be a full-time thing infusing the person with the desire to be more fully human. That means taking the interests of others into account. I have taught business ethics to graduate students for many years at Hofstra University. I understand the pressures they face in business, attempting to maintain their integrity while keeping a job. Some handle the situation well, negotiating dilemmas in a way that they can still rightly call themselves ethical.

I have no way of knowing which students are guided by their faith and which don’t turn to religion in any way. What does keep some on the ethical path, though, is a sincere desire to lead a life as a good and decent person. If faith helps in that regard, who can argue? Whether those who are faithful are, in fact, more ethical than others I will leave to researchers to uncover.  

The Rev. Vicky L. Eastland

Pastor, Brookville Reformed Church, Brookville  

So often we compartmentalize our lives. Our home life is separate from our work, and our worship is separate from all other aspects of our lives. We live as though our worship of God shouldn’t affect the decisions we make at home or at the office.

In reality, a person’s faith should inform their ethics at work and at home. The Christian faith teaches that there are “fruits of the spirit” that we are to strive toward. In the Christian Bible, Galatians 5:22,23 says, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” These fruits, or evidences, that a person is guided by the spirit of God should carry over into every aspect of their life. To act a certain way in church, synagogue, mosque or temple and then the next day treat a co-worker with contempt or a lack of patience is not being true to one’s faith.

Most know that our actions speak louder than words. As people of faith, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or any other practice of religion, we strive to live godly lives, seeking to grow to become better than we are, always drawing on the power of the One who is greater to show us the way. Therefore, one should never feel the need to “check their faith at the door” in the workplace, because our faith is what informs our ethics and, in turn, our social behavior.

Rabbi Elliot Skiddell

Central Synagogue-Beth Emeth, Rockville Centre:

All religions and spiritual movements promote ethical behavior as cornerstones of their teachings. It is reasonable to think that they expect ethical behavior from their adherents in all aspects of their lives and interactions with others. Ethical behavior is not situational, confined to the walls of the house of worship or place of study. Nor are those who have faith instructed to act ethically only to members of their own family or community.

Even those who profess to not follow a particular faith are guided in their lives by the ethical teachings of the religions that shape the society in which they live, whether they acknowledge that. It stands to reason that our faith would shape how we behave in our places of work and interact with co-workers. This is true no matter the setting or the work we do.

A problem arises when people of faith compartmentalize their behavior and think that their faith’s ethical teachings do not function in their business, in their dealings with customers or in the way they treat employees. People who cast their faith aside, along with faith’s ethical framework for life, are acting in ways that do not bring honor and respect to the faith that they say they believe in. Our task as faith leaders is to remind “the faithful” that the lessons we teach are applicable equally to the workplace and to the worship place.