UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

MGT 532

NAME: MARDHIYAH RIDZUAN

SID NUM: 2009815502

CLASS: LGB4D

LECTURER: MDM. NURZALISA SAIHANI

THE TROUBLE WITH BUSSINESS ETHICS

1. In an organization’s effort to maintain ethical standards, how important is it to

encourage and support employees who report possible incidents of ethical

wrongdoing (i.e., engage in whistle blowing)? Why? What can companies do to

support whistle blowers?

Ethical sensitivity can be described as a personal characteristic that

enables people to distinguish the presence of an ethical issue and determine its

relative importance. As in an organization, ethics has to be practiced seriously

and constantly. Employees need to have their consciousness on the importance

of work ethics to avoid any types of offense. Hence, companies should maintain

and encourage workers who report on the possible incidents of ethical

wrongdoing or most likely known as “whistle-blower”. This is due to the fact that

incidents that involve corporate offense are occurring most of the time and these

will affect the credibility of the corporate leaders themselves. Hence, by

supporting those whistle-blowers, companies can maintain their good names and

images to their competitors. Next, encouraging and supporting whistle-blowers

will help the management to strengthen their workers charity and prove their fair-

minded characteristic. This is because each employee has their own right and

agreement with the company in wrongdoing and benefits they make in the

organization. Thus, if one employee cheated on the organization and receives

benefits unfairly, another employee who realizes this issue has his right to report

the case to the upper management. All of the importance can be listed in the

ethical principles consists of utilitarianism, individual rights, and distributive

justice.

Next, we move on to the factors that influences perceived moral intensity.

Some of them are magnitude of consequences that questions on how much

threat or benefit will occur to others as a result of the actions. The moral intensity

will become higher when the harm or benefit is larger. The next factor is social

consensus. Social consensus concerns on the amount of people that agree that

the action done is ethically good or bad. If many people agree the action done is

bad, the moral intensity will become higher. Next, the factors are probability of

effect, temporal immediacy, proximity, and concentration of effect.

Based on the case study discussed, the whistle-blower (Lowry) was

experience harm when she reported the wrongdoing in her workplace. Therefore,

to avoid this kind of cases to happen, the organization itself may work on few

steps or strategy to support whistle blowers. Some of the way are creating ethical

codes of conduct, provides ethics training, introducing procedures so that

employees can communicate any ethical violations occurred within the

organizations, and lastly to practice the culture of ethical decision-making.

2. What are actions are described in this case study that companies have taken to

improve ethical standard in their organizations? Are these actions substantive

changes or mostly symbolic? Why?

Ethics is the study of moral principles or values that determine whether actions

are right or wrong and whether the outcomes are good or bad. As referring to the case

study, the employee had reported a possible unethical behaviour by one of her

supervisors. However, after an investigation has been made, the accusation seemed to

be wrong. So, in this case it had made the employee felt hesitant to report anymore

offense or wrongdoing. As what can be seen from this case study, the organization or

company had clearly provided ethics training to its employee. Employees must resolve

ethics violations at each department,

In this study case, the company (Wal-Mart Store) also introduced procedures

whereby employees can communicate possible ethical violations without feeling

hesitated. That’s why the employee, Chalace Epley Lowry could report the offense she

spotted as stated in the case study.

As we can conclude from this case, those actions done are practically symbolic

due to the reason that the actions taken didn’t bring any benefits for the employee since

the employee (Lowry) has to find another job when her identity as the whistle-blower

revealed.