Cultural Identity and Ethical Decision Making: An Experiential Exercise

This experiential exercise enables students to explore an ethical decision and the relationship between cultural identity (as operationalized by Hofstede) and ethical decision making. The exercise involves a short case that can also be used as a role-play. Complete instructions for running and debriefing the exercise as either a case or a role-play and all materials are included

Organizational Downsizing During an Economic Crisis: Survivors’ and Victims’ Perspectives

The recession that began in 2007 resulted in organizational retrenchment strategies focused on workforce reductions. In order to successfully emerge from this crisis and sustain long-term viability for their organizations, managers needed to reengage surviving employees and minimize the potential for retaliatory behavior by the victims of the downsizing activities. An understanding of the perceptions of both survivors and victims is critical when managers implement downsizing and recovery strategies. The psychological contract and attribution theory were used to examine employee perceptions post downsizing. The variables of interest in this study include employee perceptions related to organizational communication; understanding and agreement with organizational strategy; local management’s involvement in downsizing decisions; management responsiveness to employee needs; perceived fairness; optimism about the future of the company; and job security. A survey of 540 adults registered in an accelerated bachelor’s of business administration program during 2009 completed a downsizing survey designed for this study. This study found perceptual differences between the survivors and victims related to corporate management’s responsiveness to employee needs during downsizing; the fairness of the layoff decisions; managements’ favoritism in the layoff decisions; employee optimism about the future of the organization; and employee nervousness about job security

A Systems Approach to Identifying the Sources of Decision Influences and their Importance to Individuals Facing Ethical Dilemmas

Understanding the variability in the behaviors of individuals facing ethical dilemmas in the workplace is very difficult. This research seeks an explanation for this variability in an individual’s ethical behavior by using systems thinking. When an individual is described as a system, the complexity of any decision becomes apparent. Since there are many factors that enter the decision process and many possible interactions of those factors, variable outcomes are expected. This research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the problem. Using systems thinking, several streams of literature are examined to create a theoretical model of an individual’s ethical system. Writings in systems theory, philosophy, and business are examined. A systems model of the ethical environment of the individual as a containing system comprised of many subsystems is presented as a possible way of describing the influences affecting an individual decision-maker. The model includes seven subsystems that exert influence on an individual: the workplace, family, religion, law, community profession and self. Taken together, these subsystems make up the individual’s ethical system. If, in fact, there are influences from multiple subsystems, then insights as to which ethical subsystems are important to decision-makers in different settings, and for dilemmas of different complexity will increase our understanding of the decision process. When using a systems perspective the research problem revolves around identifying the ethical subsystems that exert the most influence on the decision-maker facing an ethical dilemma. The model is tested empirically and found to have explanatory power. Some of the findings show that individuals rate the influences of the variables (e.g. the law, religion, or community) at different levels of importance as the seriousness of the breach changes. That is, specific influences become more or less important. The importance ranking of the variables also changes with case seriousness. The influence that is most important when a dilemma is seen as a minor infraction is different than the one that is ranked first when the infraction is major. In addition, there are gender, age, and management differences observed