BUSINESS

ETHICS
Lecture 4
NUTTANAN WICHITAKSORN
 OUTLINE
08 09
Manager ’s Manager ’s
Ethics: Getting, Ethics: Deciding
Promoting, and on a Corporate
Firing Workers Culture and
Making It Work
 Chapter 8:
Manager’s Ethics:
Getting, Promoting,
and Firing Workers
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Three Strategies for

Nepotism: In the case of hiring,
Announcing a Job announcing an open position only
to members of the extended family.
Opening

Internal public job announcements: Mass public job announcements:

Announcing an open position only to Announcing an open position widely
individuals already closely linked to and indiscriminately with the idea of
an organization. maximizing knowledge of the
available post and applications for it.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Ethical Perils of Job

Announcements

1. Describing a position in ways that don’t

correspond with the reality

2. Announcing a post to people who really

have no chance for the job
What Is Business

Ethics?
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Screening
• Applicant screening: Reducing a large pool of applicants to a manageable selection for
serious consideration. Filters—for example, a certain educational level—eliminate
inadequate applications rapidly.
• Bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs): Exceptions granted to equal opportunity
requirements when a specific qualification is essential to the job.
• Education: Screening job applications by eliminating those not meeting educational
requirements. The candidate may be either undereducated or overeducated for the post.
• High-risk lifestyles: Screening job applications by eliminating those whose lifestyles pose
risks to work performance. Smoking is a common example.
• Criminal record screening: Screening job applications by allow employers to resist hiring
convicts across a significant range of wrongdoing. Eliminating those whose past crimes
suggest risks in performing job duties.
• Social media: Screening job applications whose social media pages—Facebook and
similar—suggest irresponsibility or unfitness for a post.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers
Applicant Testing
➢ Valid, normalized, and constant
➢ Skill tests: Applicant tests that
reproduce jobs tasks.
➢ Psychological and personality tests:
Applicant tests attempting to
measure mental state and suitability
for job tasks.
➢ Honesty tests: Psychological tests
attempting to measure honesty.
➢ Medical tests: Testing for specific
medical problems that may impede
work performance.
➢ Drug test: Questioning about and
testing for illegal drug usage.
➢ intelligence quotient (IQ) testing:
Testing for intelligence
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Interviewing (Discussion)
➢ Fair questioning: Asking similar and similarly challenging questions to all
applicants for a post.
➢ Pertinent interview questions: Interview questions relating to job
performance.

➢ Behavioral interview: In a behavioral interview, applicants are asked to talk

about how they have responded to specific—generally stressful—situations.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Two Salary Issues

• Work incentive: Money or other
Facing Managers benefit offered to workers to
• Two salary issues facing managers are increase the quality or volume of
their work.
1. Wage confidentiality and
• Bonus: A payment to an
2. The use of wages as a work incentive employee above the agreed
upon salary for a job well done.
• Wage confidentiality: The policy that salaries of
employees within an organization will not be
disclosed to third parties.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

The Drinking Strategy

02
Findings from a research project:
(1) just drinking is better than not drinking for your wallet and
(2) at least for men, drinking socially at bars is even better. Note: The Western Culture
There are two issues regarding the drinking strategy:
➢ Should you consider a worker’s party aptitude?
➢ If you do, how should you manage it?

CASE STUDY A case from New Zealand

 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Three Considerations for

Promotion

Work performance: Seniority: Projected

A measure of how well an The ranking of employees
employee is performing in terms of how long
the duties of the job. they’ve been working in
the organization.
performance:
An employee’s work performance
is judged by predicting how well
future, usually distinct, tasks will
be accomplished.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Optimal Level Firing

Basic questions:

• When can an employee be fired?

• When should an employee be fired?

• How should an employee be fired once the

decision’s been made?

• What steps can management take to support

workers in a world where firing is inevitable?
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

When Can an Employee

Be Fired?

➢ At-will employment: The employer’s right to fire

any employee at any time for any reason or for no
reason whatsoever.
➢ Just cause firing: The doctrine that employers have
a responsibility to demonstrate that dismissed What Is Business Ethics
workers were failing to fulfil their duties adequately.
?
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

When Should an Employee Be Fired?

Three broad philosophies:

➢ Inverted Seniority occurs when the last worker hired is the first released. This
works especially well for assembly-line-type labor where one worker can
replace another easily.
➢ Workload firings focus the pain of job cuts on that part of the company
suffering most directly from a falloff in business.
➢ Recovery preparation takes the long view on an economic slowdown: firings
and layoffs are executed not so much to compensate for the present downturn
but to sharpen the company for success when the economy bounces back.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

When Should an Employee Be Fired? (cont.)

➢ Fundamental changes in the market: Basic and far-reaching changes in

consumer demands.
➢ Rank and yank: The management practice of ranking employee performance
and dismissing those near the bottom even when they are fulfilling their duties
adequately.
➢ Employee misbehavior: Employee actions breaking the organization’s rules or
norms.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

• Rudeness toward clients or customers

Standard • Drinking or drugs on the job
definitions of • Theft of company property or using
company property for personal business
misbehavior • Frequent and unexplained absences
from work
• Entering false information on records
• Gross insubordination
• Fighting or other physical aggression
• Harassment of others (sexual, sexual
orientation, religious, racial, and similar)
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

How Should an
Employee Be Fired
Once the Decision’s
Been Made?
➢ Manager’s duty to the organization: The manager’s
ethical responsibility to protect the interests of the
organization.
➢ Manager’s duty to the employee: The manager’s
ethical responsibility to protect the interests of his or
What Is Business
her employees.
Ethics?
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

What Steps Can

Management Take to
Two strategies serve this purpose:
Support Workers in a
1. Actions can be implemented
World Where Firing Is to minimize the occasions when
Inevitable? firing will be necessary
2. Steps can be taken to reduce
the severity of the firing
One response to the inescapable experience for employees when it
reality that firing happens is happens.
preemptive; it’s to reduce the moral
uncertainty and hardship before they
arise.
 Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers

Some Recommendations
• Recruit for the potential to increase competence, not simply for narrow skills to fill
today’s slots.
• Rotate assignments: allow workers to expand their competence.
• Retrain employees instead of firing them.
• Offer learning opportunities and seminars in work-related fields.
• Subsidize employee trips to work-related conferences and meetings.
• Provide educational sabbaticals for employees who want to return to school.
• Encourage independence and entrepreneurship: turn every employee into a self-
guided professional.
• Keep employees informed of management decisions concerning the direction of the
company: What units are more and less profitable? Which ones will grow? Which may
shrink?
• Ensure that pensions and benefits are portable.
 Chapter 9:
Manager’s Ethics:
Deciding on a
Corporate Culture and
Making It Work
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Other definitions

What Is Corporate • The shared beliefs top managers have in a company

about how they should manage themselves and
Culture? other employees, and how they should conduct their
business.
Corporate culture: The
• The pattern of shared values and beliefs that gives
constellation of beliefs, customs,
members of an institution meaning and provides
habits, and values determining
them with rules for behavior in their organization.
how a business or organization
• A general constellation of beliefs, mores, customs,
acts in the world.
value systems and behavioral norms, and ways of
doing business that are unique to each corporation,
that set a pattern for corporate activities and
actions, and that describe the implicit and emergent
patterns of behavior and emotions characterizing life
in the organization.
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Common threads to
definitions
• Corporate culture is shared.
• Corporate culture provides guidance.
• Corporate culture provides meaning in the
organization.
• Corporate culture is top heavy.
• A corporate culture is a constellation of values.
• The constellation of cultural values is dynamic.
• An organization’s culture is organic.
• The organization’s culture includes life values.
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

What’s My Organization’s Culture?

• Workplace time • Leisure time

• Employee interaction • Community interaction
• Workplace mood • Social cause activism
• Workplace personalization • Political action
• Workers/People doing work • Religious belief
• Dress codes
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Organizational code: A set of

written rules defining an
How Is Organizational organizational culture and
Culture Instilled? indicating how individuals ought to
act within the organization.

Cultural dissonance: A conflict

between the values the
organization publicly promotes as
essential to its functioning, and the
➢ Organizational code values guiding an organization’s
➢ Cultural dissonance workers in their day-to-day
activities.
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Social Conditioning
A set of social cues and pressures provided by the actions and
habits of an organization’s members that guide new members
toward how they are to act within the organization

Discussion (pages 433-435)

corporate culture in an
organization influenced
by social conditioning
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

The Relation between

Organizational Culture and
Knowing the Right Thing to Do
Compliance: In the business world, compliance
measures the distance between what an
organization says it believes in the abstract and
what it and its members actually do.
An Ethically Questionable Corporate Culture:
Duty theory, consequentialist-utilitarian
theory, egoism
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

A Corporate Culture
Ethics Audit
Group Discussion
(pages 440-441)
Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Two Ethically Knotted Scenes

of Corporate Culture
➢ Dress code: A set of rules—explicit or
implicit—distinguishing what garments may
and what may not be worn in the workplace.
➢ Grooming codes: A set of rules—explicit or
implicit—concerning hygiene and
presentation at work. Codes may concern
hair, tattoos, fingernails, and similar.
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Choosing the Right

Organizational Culture
for Me
➢ What Counts as Success?

➢ Am I a Collectivist or an Individualist?

➢ What Do I Value More, the Means or the Ends?

What Is Business Ethics
➢ How Do I See My Employees?
?
 Manager’s Ethics: Deciding on a Corporate Culture and Making It Work

Selecting a
Leadership Persona Leadership styles:
• Visionary
• Coach
• Affiliative
• Democratic
• Pacesetter
• Commander
Persona of leadership: The image
and values a leader chooses to
project across the workplace.
THANK YOU