As recent Abercrombie & Fitch case shows, obeying orders not always smart. Recently, the manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Virginia Beach decided to keep, what some deemed, risqué photos of models hung up on his store walls even though local police told him to take the pictures down. Why didn’t he listen to the cops? Because the manager’s corporate bosses asked him to display the photos.
The manager ended up with a citation by the local authorities and faced possible jail time and a fine. While the charges were eventually dropped, this event serves as a great lesson for all employees out there. You don’t have to do everything your boss tells you to, especially if it runs afoul of the law. Clearly, breaking the law can get you in real trouble, but blindly following orders and engaging in illegal or unethical activities on the job can wreak havoc on your career and possibly hurt other people.
Take Barbara, a Denver-based senior underwriter for a major mortgage company. Over a two year period, she was asked by her manager to sign off on home loans for individuals that she knew were not worthy of loans because of their questionable credit and employment backgrounds. “I determined that the information these people provided wasn’t accurate, or questionable but my manager would say, ‘let it go,’” says Barbara, who declined to use her full name. After months of doing what she felt in her gut wasn’t right, she became depressed as she began to hear about people were losing their homes because of loan defaults. So, this past fall, she decided to take a stand and wrote a letter to the company’s human resource department even though she thought she was jeopardizing her job. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she explained, still a hint of agony in her voice.
The real estate industry, says Ralph R. Roberts, author of Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud, is rife with these types of scenarios that began with the housing boom and have only gotten worse as management at many of these firms become desperate to get business in a housing slump. But it’s not just real estate. Workers in a host of sectors are feeling pressure to compromise their ethics standards, or break the law, according to Patricia Harned, president of the Ethics Resource Center, an independent research organization. Among the top industries where this is seen are entertainment, hotel and food services, transportation, retail, and healthcare, just to name a few.
