A Matter of Awareness and Trust: Dealing with Employee Conflicts of Interest

Employee conflicts of interest can have serious negative implications for organizations. Some of these may be financial while others can affect the entire value chain.

Document Highlights 

This briefing summarizes the results of a Conference Board Corporate Responsibility and Ethics Council working session designed to identify employee conflict of interest (COI) issues and best practice approaches for dealing with them.

This briefing serves to:

1. define COI;
2. discuss three types of activities that can involve COI–commission and incentive-based sales, moonlighting and gift giving and receiving;
3. outline the implications of each type of COI; and
4. identify potential courses of action to address such COI activities.

Managing conflict of interest is about awareness, training, management mechanisms and appropriate disclosure.