OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Ethical Communities Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Understand the four ethical communities
2. Apply an ethical community 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.

The situation I am analyzing is a district retreat I was involved in during my first year as a
store manager. The district that I work in is in the mid-west and spans two states and four
cities. At my level, my peers and I get together six times a year to discuss upcoming
promotions, strategies, and objectives. My leader decided that for this meeting she wanted
to turn it into a team building retreat. Retreats have been proven to be effective at team
building, but intentional planning and process will lead to better results (Brown, pg. 137).
This retreat was not planned, well thought out, or a successful team building event. It was
planned and communicated to us two weeks in advance, and in my company all our
scheduling is done three weeks out. This caused us all to adjust our schedules which had
impacts on our employees, customers, and business. The activities planned for the retreat
did not pertain to our role, and my leader was directly involved in sowing distrust and
frustration within the team.

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

The organization that I was affiliated with during this situation put a lot of emphasis on
ethics. When talking about the soul of an organization and what that stood for, this
organization built its foundation on that. Throughout its fifty years, there have been several
incidents that garnered media attention, and the organization would always act with
transparency and respect towards the situation at hand. They claim to be aspirational in their
pursuit of their mission and values, meaning that they will not always get it right, but they
will take steps in the right direction when they get it wrong.

Based on the strong ethical foundation the organization had, some of the parameters of this
retreat did not sit well with us. The budget was taken care of under the table because it was
so far over. Then my boss told us we would not get paid mileage for driving hundreds of
miles to the location in our personal vehicles. Our assistant store managers are paid hourly
and were required to be there, which resulted in them working overtime. My boss tried to
tell them they would not get paid any overtime for that week. Most of us had been with the
company for a while and knew that our boss was trying to break company policies, so we
pushed back on some of them, but it put us in an uncomfortable position to do so.

3) Recommend how you would apply one of the ethical community metaphors (see
Exhibit 20.1 in Bolman and Deal) for an alternative course of action regarding your
case.
In this case I would recommend applying the extended family metaphor. This ethical
community metaphor talks about how community needs servant-leadership concerned with
the needs of others. This need creates a challenge for leaders to understand and lead the
collective well-being. (Bolman & Deal, 2021, pg. 416). It goes further into detail saying that
leaders need to listen, understand, accept, and be vulnerable.

These are all areas where my leader struggled, and because of that put up defenses. She was
reluctant to listen to anything we had to say in the workshops and did not seem to put in any
effort to understand our frustrations or challenges. By applying the family metaphor, my
leader could have been able to open herself up to the things we needed.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about ethics.
Given what I have learned about the ethical frame, I think I would have voiced my concerns
about the whole retreat with my leader when she first brought it up to me. I had red flags
going off from the beginning, but I chose not to say anything initially because I wanted to
trust my leader and hope for the best. As I got more of the details and some of the more
ethical dilemmas came to the surface, I would have chosen to have an uncomfortable but
necessary conversation about the nature of the retreat.
 References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2021). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (7th
ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Brown, J. T. (2014). The Handbook of Program Management: How to Facilitate Project Success
with Optimal Program Management. McGraw-Hill.