Ethical Decisions in the Workplace
After reading your background readings, review the following scenario and address the questions at the end.
Jerry Stevens heads up an excavation crew for the municipal utilities district in a city in Nebraska. A sewer line needs to be replaced and it has been excavated with a back-hoe.
The trench is 7 feet deep. The municipality's safety rules indicate that employees should not go into the trench without a trench box.
This rule is to prevent employees from being buried if the trench walls collapse. People die every year from trench cave-ins.
The trench box won't arrive on site for another 6 hours and the city promised residents that the sewer would be fixed by the end of the day, which now seems impossible.
The City Administrator called Jerry on his cell phone and indicated that it was imperative that the sewer be fixed as soon as conceivably possible because a City Council member is served by that sewer line and will raise a fuss if it’s not fixed by the promised time.
One of the more experienced workers states, "It's only going to take 30 minutes to dig under the pipe and loosen the fittings. We don't need the trench box.
We used to do this all the time before we were required to use one of those darn things."
Jerry knows he's right. He used to do it himself before the rule was put in place. Also, the soil is clearly a cohesive soil and it's highly unlikely that it will collapse.
And although there is an organizational policy to use a trench box for trenches deeper than 5 feet, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does not have jurisdiction over municipalities in Nebraska because municipalities are political subdivisions of the State.
The only entity regulating safety policies is the City's Safety Director and he took the day off.
In this scenario, to what extent do you think allowing the crew into the trench without a trench box would be pushing (or exceeding) the limit?
Discuss any ethical grey areas in this scenario?
What in your mind is the right thing to do?
What is the value of having an ethics program (and related programs like safety programs) and what are the responsibilities of front line leaders/supervisors and the workers when they face dilemmas such as the one described?
Take some time to review the materials and take a position on the issue.
Write a 2- to 3-page assessment of the authors’ claims, and your assessment of what might be done in a place of business to prevent the "moral amnesia" phenomenon from taking a foothold in a place of business.
Required Readings:
For your SLP assignment, read the following article.
De Cremer, D., & de Bettignies, H. (2013). Pragmatic business ethics. Business Strategy Review, 24(2), 64-67. Retrieved from Trident Online Library.
Also, spend some time researching other sources to help you develop your key arguments.
Snell, R. (2013). Teaching rules-based and values-based ethics. Journal of Health Care Compliance, 15(1), 29-32. Retrieved from the Trident Online Library.
Cavico, F. J., & Mujtaba, B. G. (2017). Wells Fargo's fake accounts scandal and its legal and ethical implications for management. S.A.M.Advanced Management Journal, 82(2), 4-19.
The following tutorial provides detailed information that can be applied to the topics of this course. There are a number of videos and lessons on ethics.
Beekun, R. (2010). Effects of justice and utilitarianism on ethical decision making: A cross‐cultural examination of gender similarities and differences. Journal of Business Ethics, 19(4), 309-325.