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WORKING AS AN INDIVIDUAL Suppose you face an ethical dilemma that is putting your personal values to the test.

What would you do in the following situation?

The company where you are employed has a very clear procedure for a task but you know a

“better” way to do the job. Your productivity results are a bit low this month. If you use your new approach and violate the “rules,” you can raise your results to a higher level.

It can be useful to check your choices against some ethical tests:

䊉 Front-page test. How would I feel if my decision became a headline in a local newspaper? Would I feel comfortable describing my actions or decision to a customer or stockholder?

䊉 Golden rule test. Would I be willing to be treated in the same manner?

䊉 Personal gain test. Is an opportunity for personal gain clouding my judgment? Would I make the same decision if the outcome did not benefit me in any way?

Source: © 2010, Ethics Resource Center. Used with permission of the Ethics Resource Center, 2345 Crystal Drive, Ste 201, Arlington, VA 22202, www.ethics.org.

Such examples suggest that the application of employee discipline requires some basic guidelines to protect employees from being victimized by supervisors. Here are some basic guidelines for giving employee discipline in a fair and impartial way.

1. Notify employees in advance of a company’s work rules and the consequences for violating them. An employee who violates a work rule should be given the opportunity to correct the behavior without being punished.

2. Investigate the facts of an employee’s misconduct before applying discipline. Give an employee the opportunity to give his or her side of the story before a decision is made about whether the misconduct actually took place.

3. Be consistent in the response to rule violations. Discipline should be administered consis-tently without favoritism or discrimination.

Office Romance

Romance often blossoms in the workplace. People who spend time together are likely to develop romantic feelings. Unfortunately, when a romantic relationship ends, as many of them do, one partner may feel angry and abandoned. A broken relationship can be highly disruptive to people who are simply trying to focus on work. Co-workers may even be drawn into the conflict, which can strain working relations if the unit requires a high degree of collaboration between employees.

Further, when romantic partners are publicly affectionate in front of customers or other employees, it makes some people uncomfortable. Public displays of affection are almost always inappropriate. Jealousy or suspicion may result, if someone else has romantic intentions toward the co-worker involved, or if it is a boss involved in the romance. Subordinates may suspect that the boss is being manipulated by his or her romantic partner and showing favoritism as a result.

The supervisor’s credibility may be undermined in the eyes of subordinates.

Few companies actually ban romantic relationships in the workplace. However, many try to provide basic rules of conduct regarding office romances. Employees should be sensitive not only to the feelings of the partner in the relationship but also to co-workers and customers who may be affected by the couple’s behavior. Here are two basic suggestions for ethical employee conduct in a romantic relationship at the workplace.

䊏 Public displays of affection at the workplace should be discouraged.

䊏 Employees should be prohibited from dating people they directly supervise. If a romance begins, one or the other partner should be transferred.

Giving Gifts in the Workplace

Gift giving routinely occurs in the workplace. Employees often exchange gifts with each other during the Christmas holidays, managers give flowers to their secretaries on special occasions, and vendors customarily give merchandise such as coffee mugs or pens to prospective cus-tomers. These situations represent constructive gift giving to build relationships between people by letting them know they are appreciated.

Sometimes, however, by accepting a gift from a vendor or employee a person faces an ethi-cal dilemma. A test of the ethiethi-cal appropriateness of accepting the gift would be to first think about how a manager or co-worker would perceive the gift and the person who gave it. If you would feel uncomfortable explaining the gift, the discomfort probably means it would be ethi-cally problematic. Here are some examples of situations where it would be clearly unethical to give or accept gifts:

䊏 A vendor seeking to develop a business relationship with a company may offer to provide lucrative financial opportunities to the executive in charge of purchasing, expecting to influence the executive to buy the vendor’s product. The vendor is, in fact, using the gift as a bribe. The executive may be unduly influenced to purchase inferior goods. Closing deals with bribes probably means the products cannot compete in the marketplace. For example, several executives at Qwest, one of the major U.S. telecommunications companies, received valuable stock options from some smaller suppliers of Internet gear, and later steered large contracts to those companies. After the financial scandal was exposed, it became clear that Qwest executives made purchasing decisions based on who gave them

stock options, not on the best equipment. One of the former members of Qwest’s board of directors called the practice of suppliers giving stock options as an enticement an “ethical nightmare.”¹⁴

䊏 In part of a larger investigation of employee misconduct at A. T. Kearney Inc., a manage-ment consulting firm, it was revealed that CEO Fred Steingraber used funds from his per-sonal expense account to purchase gifts for family members. Steingraber used company funds to purchase a laptop computer for his son, and paid $37,000 for a lavish 50th birth-day party for his wife, complete with a magician and surprise visits from her sisters, who were flown in from Germany. In defense of his spending for his wife’s birthday,

Steingraber stated that the party was also attended by executives from A. T. Kearney cus-tomers who would later purchase consulting services from the firm.¹⁵Inviting potential customers to a birthday party for the CEO’s wife in order to influence their purchasing decisions is probably more than merely inappropriate. It may have been criminal.

LOC-In ⁴ Learning Objective Check-In

Marie has found that her job as a manager presents a variety of ethical challenges. She is often involved in determining whether employees should receive pay increases, certain future assign-ments, promotions, or even layoffs. While she does not particularly like one of her subordinates, she knows that she will have to collect accurate and fair information about him in order to help in the evaluation process. Another situation Marie has been dealing with involves two of her subordinates, one of whom is directly responsible for supervising the other as part of a work team. These two individuals have become romantically involved since Marie assumed her role in managing them, and she is debating whether or not to transfer one of them to another area of the company.

1. Which of the following is a true statement about an ethical way for Marie to deal with the subordinate she does not like?

a. Marie should devote substantial time to collecting accurate performance information about him.

b. Marie does not have to let her subordinate know what skills he has or has not mastered and which require improvement.

c. Marie may deliberately provide misleading information because she dislikes the subordinate.

d. Marie should incorporate her personal feelings toward the employee into the evaluation so that he knows why she does not like him.

2. Marie wants to ensure that her employees conduct themselves ethically. She does not mind the idea of an office romance, but her firm does require that relationships cannot exist between employees and their direct supervisors. For this reason, ______.

a. Marie will likely require both employees to transfer to new positions.

b. Marie will likely require that the two individuals limit public displays of affection, but they may continue the relationship in their current work roles.

c. Marie will likely require the transfer of one or the other of the two employees involved with each other.

d. Marie will likely initiate an investigation into employee misconduct regarding the romantic relationship.

A common approach companies use to avoid conflicts of interest in gift giving is to have a gift policy that limits the dollar value to a modest amount, such as $25. The policy may also require that each employee fully disclose each gift that is given and received along with its dollar value.

In cultures outside the United States, especially in developing economies, the laws and ethics related to giving gifts between parties as a business practice are highly diverse. In the African nation of Senegal, 40 percent of executives were reported to believe that bribery was necessary to obtain a public contract.¹⁶Managers seeking to do business within foreign cultures that are more tolerant of bribery and kickbacks may wish to avoid the temptation of using these practices, even if it means losing some business. Companies in countries with laws against giving bribes still face ethical challenges related to gift giving. For example, there is a tradition in the pharmaceutical industry of allowing sales representatives to give free samples of drugs to

doctors. Police in Verona, Italy, opened an investigation of this practice by GlaxoSmithKline.

They discovered a scheme that went beyond giving free samples to doctors. Company sales rep-resentatives gave gifts such as computers and lavish trips to doctors in exchange for writing of prescriptions for the company’s drugs.¹⁷Such a “race to the bottom” of the ethical yardstick in order to win a foreign business contract is not worth the price, because public disclosure of this form of gift giving harms a company’s reputation. A tarnished company reputation is nearly impossible to repair.

The Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 displayed in Table 3.2 indicates the perceptions of corruption that occur in the 10 least corrupt (with high index numbers) and the 10 most cor-rupt countries (with low index numbers). It was based on a survey of international managers and academics. As shown, the United States is ranked as the 19th least corrupt country, behind coun-tries with “cleaner” business practices such as Finland, Sweden, and New Zealand. There are a total of 180 countries ranked on corruption in the total survey. Countries ranked low on the Corruption Perceptions Index (most corrupt) are more likely to tolerate bribery as a business practice than countries with a high rank.