Andrew Mesa

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 Module 1 I talked about my company J.R. Capital, and we do equipment financing and
working capital loans for businesses. We act as a middle-man between our partners
(banks) and our clientele. My role is a salesman who is targeting business owners who
are looking to add new equipment for their businesses and help them fund it. Recently, I
was given the task along with a team of 4 other people, to create a new branch of the
company to bring in interns from ASU. It was the expectation from the executives of the
company that we allocate new interns, train them, and ensure that they have the necessary
tools to help increase the company’s outreach.

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

The ethics of the organization have caused massive changes than if we had just started a
new team of interns in a normal way. Our company tries to keep strong interpersonal ties,
and we rarely do random new-hires. We do not advertise on Indeed or ZipRecruiter,
because the company culture is based upon referrals to be brought in. My roommate was
the one who brought me into the company. The ethics behind this is the idea that we are
more willing to keep our friends accountable, and we would not do this to random people
who we simply work with. It also makes the transition of bringing in new people in much
smoother when they already have friends in the company.

Not being able to put up a job listing due to the company culture and ethical standpoint
tied our hands together as we are trying to increase the overall size of our intern team. We
were faced with the decision of starting out the initial hirings of interns with only 4, or to
have them wait 2 more weeks to hope that we can bring in more to start. We hoped to

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 start with a team of at least 10, because it would give us a very good test run of our
training method, equipment needed, and their feedback to see what needs to be changed.

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

When starting a new team, my team and I thought that it was important to start with a
larger group than 4. Our executives for the company gave us the green light to start them
with 4 instead of waiting. If we were to apply the ethical community of Utilitarian ethics
I think we would have been much more effective. In an article I found it says, “The larger
the sample size, the more accurate the average values will be. Larger sample sizes also
help the researchers identify outliers in data and provide smaller margins of error.”
(cwauthors.com). Having a larger sample size to start would have been able to give us a
better understanding of the added revenue that the intern team could have brought in. We
had to take a risk that the 4 interns we hired were able to give us a fair estimate as to the
effectiveness of what a larger team would bring in.

If were able to use a more outcome based style of thinking like the Utilitarian ethics, we
would have waited until we had a larger intern team to start to find more factual numbers
to base on the effectiveness of the program. We could have used the numbers they put up
in the first 3 months to see if we should put more money/training into the program to
boost profits and sales. It also gave us a chance to bring in new and highly motivated
college students looking for a company to take a chance on them. We can find the strong
and smart interns to promote to increase the work ethic from the others.

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

I have already said a bit about what I would have done differently now knowing about the
utilitarian ethics, but my team and I did not have a say that would have mattered. In
previous weeks, I have mentioned about our top-down business model, and we have to
implement whatever our executives thinks will work best. I can give my opinion and my
facts, but at the end of the day it comes down their decisions.

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1. https://www.cwauthors.com/article/importance-of-having-large-sample-sizes-for-
research#:~:text=The%20larger%20the%20sample%20size,provide%20smaller%20margins
%20of%20error.
The Importance of having Large Sample Sizes for your research – Charlesworth Author
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