Introduction
Ethical decisions create and maintain trust while also demonstrating respect, responsibility, and a caring attitude. Ethical decision-making is essential in the workplaces to ensure the regulation of conflicts and uncertainty from competing values, including individual, organizational and societal values. Business organizations require decision-making models, which are tools that facilitate the ability to cultivate the capability to evaluate an ethical dilemma and obtain an ethical decision using ethical principles, obligations, and values.
Globalization and digitization have transformed the ethical issues in business, and the intensity and effects are increasing the challenges and complaints. Ethical issues in businesses, companies, corporate, and medium and small enterprises have developed in new forms. Several ethical issues such as legal liability, workplace safety, child labor, bribery, overbilling, cybercrime, privacy risks, and disclosures manifest in various businesses and managements. Therefore, ethical issues need assessment and identification of recommendations for strategies to improve different situations.
Ethical Issue in the Context of Workplace
Operating solely for owners’ profits has been a dominant objective of most companies in business practice until a few years ago. Companies have identified the significance of incorporating their projects with ethics, particularly with their responsibility towards society or the environment (Sroka and Szántó 2018). A company that deserves recognition as a reliable business partner with respect in the business sector need to exhibit high institutionalization standards of business ethics principles and practices along with embracing exceptional ethical behavior. Business ethics involves adhering to rules and moral values while undertaking business operations and safeguarding the legal rights of people, society, humanities, and firms, along with environmental protection. A company’s business ethics works on the foundation of trust, integrity, honesty, transparency, and regulations. Companies need to obey business ethics to gain stakeholder confidence, enhanced productivity, and protection of consumers’ trust.
Companies experience different categories of ethical issues which occur at various levels. Business ethical issues can be at individual, organizational, or company. This societal or global level occurs due to the current technology that has introduced connection through social media and the internet. Ethical issues can also be at the business operating environment level, corporate ethical level, which considers the firm’s policies and procedures. Different forms of ethical issues may occur in a company and may include fundamental issues, diversity issues, decision-making issues, and compliance and governance issues (Nuseir and Ghandour, 2019). Therefore, ethical issues have different elements which require adequate understanding before applying to any specific company setting.
Companies need to assume social responsibility since it is morally right to do so. According to virtue theory, firms need to behave according to trust levels since trust is a virtue. Ethical problems at the workplace occur in different forms and result in various types and levels of ethical dilemmas. The failure of workers’ character that leads an individual to unethical conduct is one cause of the workplace’s moral challenge (Kabeyi 2018). Company goals and social culture, which are not firm or strict on ethical practice, causing ethical challenges at the workplace. Personal values and the firm’s goals may contradict hence causing a threat to ethical behavior at the workplace. Individuals at the workplace can resort to unethical practices due to various factors. Environmental factors in which the operating environment at the workplace can initiate unethical behavior. Lack of transparency in multiple workplaces can also be determinants of corrupt practice. Another vital aspect is obedience to authority, which pushes workers to please the authority irrespective of whether they disregard their ethical standards (Quarshie et al. 2016). The above factors can cause ethical issues related to individuals working in divisions such as the accounting and finance section.
Description of Ethical Issue
I have been working with a steel plant for the past ten years. The plant was established as a Greenfield project and had a captive harbor for receiving raw materials and shipment of finished goods. The company uses Ferroalloys and aluminum bars which are stored in closed stores. The Ferro Alloy Stores are under the management of the storekeeper who also manages other stores like general stores, isotope stores, and heavy machinery stores. The storekeeper is responsible for daily operations like receipts, issues, and accounting, under which he manages four employees. The permits and issues are accountable by weighing at weighing scale, which is not commissioned. The company also approximates the bag weights of the problems.
During a particular working day, the central industrial security force discovered mounds of ferroalloys bags deposited near the proposed harbor project area. The bags, however, contained stones and not Ferro-Manganese. The rocks are dark-colored and look like Fe-Mn. The security forces reported the incident to the managing director MD, after which the stores’ department commenced an assessment process for the damage.
The company operates through orders which are placed at the company’s stores after pre-dispatch inspection. The firm’s quality team is responsible for review of the goods before giving clearance for dispatch. The gunny bags are sealed with lead wire and a seal of the company’s inspection. An appointed supplier transporter delivers the material at the Ferro-Alloy stores within two days, during which the drivers stay at designated points during transit before reaching the selling destinations.
Stakeholder Analysis
The board of management of the steel plant represents the main stakeholders in the business operations, including receiving raw materials and shipping finished products. The storekeeper is another critical stakeholder as the position of the position is managing the store’s daily operations. Any issue and misconduct that occurs within these premises, such as receipts, accounting, and problems. The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) is responsible for the safety of operations in the company and an important stakeholder that can be directly responsible for any insecure and nonprocedural process in the company, such as its mounds ferroalloys bags lying near the project zone.
Under the leadership of the storekeeper and the managing director MD, the store department is also a significant stakeholder responsible for the company operations, such as testing the bags’ contents and shipping and making issues to customers. The firm’s quality team is also responsible for the value and standard of the bags the company delivers to customers and raw materials they acquire from other organizations. Another stakeholder is the transporter who carries raw materials and supplies to the company stores; hence any compromise in the procedure will leave the transporters liable. On the other hand, the supplier company is also a vital stakeholder responsible for compensating for any net weight delivery losses.
Moral Imagination for Alternatives and Moral Philosophy
Philosophy is a methodological operation of thoughts and involves various aspects, including metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and social philosophy. Epistemology consists of the basis and content of human knowledge. Logic involves the principles and ways of reasoning, while ethics relates to human character and values and the practical aspects of life like morality (Goodstein, Butterfield and Neale 2016). Ethics must include three elements which are knowledge, feeling, and the will of acting.
Business practices are governed by both descriptive, which examines people’s ethical ideals or actions that are unacceptable in the society, and normative ethics, which is prescriptive ethics that uses ethical theories that define how people need to behave and the measures for the right and wrong practices (Sturm 2017). Individual behaviors can also be based on ethical objectivism, which believes that universal and objectively authentic moral guidelines are no personal or societal relationship.
Individuals give various explanations for their respective workplaces’ actions despite having adverse effects on other people or the environment. The firm failed to apply Milton Friedman’s principle of social responsibility that requires a business to obey business rules by using a non-commissioned scale to weigh its loads (Goodstein, Butterfield and Neale 2016). According to this moral philosophy, the corporation has ethical responsibility to protect the interest of all the stakeholders it interacts with, including employees, customers, and the community. The company’s duty in the case goes beyond producing safe and quality products and services to include charging fair prices with fair profit margins. Consequently, using a standard weighing scale would have reduced deception and transparency issues and hence develop objectivism among the employees.
If the organization would have conducted its corporate social responsibility in good faith, the business and its stakeholders would have benefited. According to Milton Friedman’s principle of social responsibility, business enterprises demonstrate the responsibility to the society they serve by exhibiting the social good of the goods and services they source or offer to the market. By using the non-commissioned scale, the firm showed that it was committed to accomplishing its financial objectives at the expense of the interests of their customers. The corporation failed to showcase that it is a socially responsible firm by working solely for-profit maximization, rather than seeking to improve the welfare of various stakeholders and sections of the society. In future, it would be imperative for the company to strive to balance business objectives and social responsibilities.
Factors that Influenced the Ethical Decision Making
Business ethics constitutes moral rules governing business practices in various organizations and can also include policies and procedures. The current businesses are intensely focused on profit earning irrespective of whether they ignore or observe ethical standards. Several factors informed the decision-making process exhibited in this ethical. Generally, when making ethical decisions, managers have to choose the transparency and image of an organization as a whole.
The first major factor the company’s management considered when making decisions related to the ethical dilemma the potential implication on ability to source supplies. The company’s operation in delivering and receipt of materials was significant when making decisions on the firm’s ethical conduct. Drivers report to the company’s stores and obtain a weighing request from the storekeeper before proceeding to the central store’s department weighbridge. At the weighbridge, the drivers take the gross weight and move to the plants stores after unloading the bags with the alloys and informing the alloys central stores for unloading. According to the standard regulations, the trucks are then weighed to determine the empty weight with permission for a variation of 0.5%. The drivers were morally upright as none of their products they delivered in the stores were contaminated.
The company’s management set up a court of inquiry by charge sheeting the storekeeper. However, the management’s decision to use the head of the alloys stores as a witness also influenced my judgment during ethical decision making. On the other hand, the firm utilized a non-commissioned weighing scale which raises ethical questions against the company. The operational procedures of the fleet of trucks in delivering the products also influenced ethical decision-making. The fact that the trucks’ flow was random without checking the bags’ content and the lack of escort for the trucks when proceeding for weighing at the store’s department raises could have affected the decision-making process.
The Outcome of the Decision
The company’s case study indicates that several departments exhibited challenges in ethical decision-making when handling problems during daily operations. Several considerations were essential during the decision-making of the incident since several stakeholders contributed indirectly to the issue. I wrote to the alloys supplier, through our company’s management to account for the missing bags. The discussion with the supplier was prolonged, but the firm made a replacement for the absent materials. I also requested the company’s leadership to demand an explanation from the head of the alloys stores on the incident and the steps that the department had put in place to investigate its cause.
Reflection on Personal Experience
The management was aware that the storekeeper had no ethical issue of integrity concerning the operational mistakes that occurred at the plant. Although the administration intended to use the head of the major stores to prove charges against the storekeeper, the pilot was, in contrast, the idea as he perceived that the storekeeper was not to blame. Still, the company’s failing by using a noncommissioned weighing scale. Ethics in the workplace should be a top-down aspect to encourage the lower ranks to embrace integrity as a virtue when performing their tasks. The management’s use of a non-commissioned weighing scale is an integrity issue that raises ethical concerns with the company’s management. The use of such a scale indicates that the company lacks transparency. This issue also led the stores’ head to find a reason not to press substantial charges against the storekeeper working under the central store’s department.
The company’s management’s decision to use the head of the significant store’s department as a witness against the storekeeper in the court of inquiry raises integrity and transparency issues against the firm’s leadership. Setting up a court of inquiry was an appropriate step, but the leaders need to have left the incident’s unfolding to occur with minimal interference.
After intensive reflection of the case, I would handle the matter from a different perspective during Decision making on ethical issues. First, the company’s management would bear much of the responsibility for the situation since the workers’ behavior and response to the harbor case were based on the company structures and leadership norms. For instance, the use of a non-commissioned scale would be a significant aspect to hold the leadership liable for the employees’ immoral conduct in their workplaces. The intention to use the head of the store’s department against the storekeeper would also be a practical component to hold the incident’s leadership. Therefore, a top-down approach is an influential leadership culture in promoting ethical behaviors at the workplace.
Recommendations
The company needs to develop and enforce a robust ethics and compliance program to establish a strong ethical foundation in the organization. An elaborate and widely communicated ethics and compliance program can be an effective tool for mitigating and managing unethical practices in the workplace in future. The program can also encourage staff members to not only observe ethical standards but also report any misconduct that occur at work and minimize the perceived risk of retaliation against whistleblowers. Committing reasonable attention and resources to promoting ethical conduct in the workplace will make a big difference. For instance, strict compliance with relevant moral standards will result in fewer workers feeling pressured to breach rules, consequently leading to a decline in violation cases.
For the ethics and compliance program should have several key elements to help realize the outcomes identified above in future. First, it should consider developing a comprehensive code of conduct outlining written standards of ethical conduct and unacceptable behaviors in the workplace. The moral values should be communicated to all staff members to promote adherence to the standards. Second, the organization should provide training on the standards. The HR department should work with other leaders continuously engage, communicate, and train their employees and other stakeholders such as suppliers will help establish and nurture an ethical culture.
Third, the senior management should set the tone for ethical practices by demonstrating high levels of integrity. Executive leaders should live the core ethical values of the company to inspire and encourage the rest of the staff members to live those standards. Maintaining transparency and honesty is an excellent way of promoting ethical behavior among the workers. Fourth, the ethics and compliance program should outline clear procedures for reporting potential and violations confidentially or anonymously. The corporation may establish an inquiry office to address employee grievances. This institution will prevent interference from the management during investigations into any situation (Ruiz-Palomino and Linuesa-Langreo, 2018). Lastly, the organization should measure and evaluate enforcement of the program regularly to ensure best practice (Aburumman, Newnam and Fildes 2019). Assessment may help avoid cases of employees leaving the company due to poor grievance management.
Conclusion
An ethical issue is a complicated situation for any individual in the workplace since it requires effective strategies to handle and secure personal interests while also observing ethically correct decisions. The company’s leadership needs to embrace a rational view and pardoned the store’s employees since the department lacked vital facilities such as the weighing scale that compromised their operations’ effectiveness. The workers had a good intention towards maintaining the firm’s image by concealing the gaps in their operating system and hence a strategic approach. Therefore, strategic handling of an ethical situation in the workplace needs to avoid demoralizing the affected employees as it can severely impact the organization. Ethical decisions create and maintain trust while also demonstrating respect, responsibility, and a caring attitude. Effective and productive ethical choices can be achievable through structured procedures and departments. Hence, organizations must establish moral divisions to promote ethical behaviors in the workplace.
Reference List
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