OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Ethical Communities Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the four ethical communities
2. Apply the ethical communities to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

In March 2020, like many others, my organization had to shut down business in
response to the Covid19 pandemic. I was furloughed along with my entire team. This
personal case analysis will discuss how my organization handled the shut down, the
reopening of stores and the continued efforts to keep employees safe as we navigated
through the pandemic. My role in this organization is a District Manager. I oversee
sixteen stores in two different states. This situation is significant because it forced me to
evolve as a leader and reevaluate the way I take care of my team.
When the nation went into shutdown, our company still paid us for the hours we
would expected if business were normal up until their decision to officially furlough
majority of the employees. They provided resources for us to ensure we had as much
information in the moment. Leadership regularly checked in with myself and my support
staff to see how we were doing and how they can better support even if we were on
furlough. They did keep key players as active employees to help navigate through the
pandemic and get us set up to return. They worked for months to figure out how to roll
out store openings, how to implement safety and cleanliness protocol and how to handle
positive Covid cases. They also worked on strategies to adapt to selling in this new
normal. As counties began to reopen, they were very strategic about which stores opened
and how they rolled this out. As people got sick, we paid them without giving them a
hard time to make sure that employee would be honest and forthcoming about their
symptoms and also to ensure they could focus on recovery instead of financial worries.
This is important because some of my stores are in the state of Texas and most of my
employees here do not have sick time.

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 2) Describe how the ethics of the organization influenced the situation.

One of the most important responsibilities of a leader is to serve a deeper role as

models of the organization’s values, beliefs and identity (Boman & Deal, 2021). The text
further explains how soul and ethics are entertwined. If organizations wish to be
successful, they must stay true to their values and identity.

One of the beliefs in my organization is to listen and respond to the needs of our
associates. Although some of the decisions we had to make to take care of our staff did
not contribute to profits, it was the right thing to do. An example of those things would be
paying our people when they were sick with Covid, regardless of whether or not Covid
sick pay was mandated by the state they worked in. We also chose to limit capacity of our
stores to make it safer for our associates to work, even though that meant less sales.
Another belief was to give back to the community and support humanity. My
organization donated about $1.3M towards relief efforts and partnered with multiple
organizations to provide PPE and food for struggling families.

3) Recommend how you would apply one of the ethical communities for an alternative
course of action regarding your case.

One alternative course of action for me would be from the symbolic lens. This
frame gives an example of a temple and it’s spiritual leader. The temple is a place you
gather with others that share the same beliefs as you and it’s spiritual leaders can help
you find meaning in the work you do (Bolman & Deal, 2021). As we reopened, I would
have liked the chance to get my team together in person to reconnect. Other districts were
able to do this, but I was not due to budget constraints. I feel like we missed a real
opportunity to participate in a pre-covid ritual of having a team meeting where we could
get together, reconnect and share ideas. This would have been a great opportunity to
restore faith in the organization and help one another navigate through uncertain times.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about ethics.

Looking at the situation from a political frame, one of the things they did right
was making sure that the field had representation in the room while making key decisions
that would impact stores. Although the majority of us were furloughed, they made sure to
keep a district manager on that would be critical to safely reopening stores. Without him,
I think our re-opening would not have been as easy.

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 Reference

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2021). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.