Organizational Ethics Issue Resolution
In the business environment of today ethical issues are a day-to-day occurrence and understanding how to address these issues is paramount to the success of an organization. In this light, an exercise in organizational ethics issue resolution is an excellent tool to help prepare an organization for the trials that may lie ahead. This exercise may also be used as the baseline reference and guide for any future ethical issues that may occur.
An organizational ethics issue resolution exercise consists of six parts, issue clarification, stakeholder analysis, values identification, issue resolution, addressing objections and finally resolution implementation (Weiss, 2006), each element building upon the next. For the purpose of this exercise the ethical issue of interest is product quality and safety versus company profit margin and pressure from a parent company.
Issue Clarification
Any organization that produces a product has faced this dilemma, a quality and safe product or better profit margins through use of lesser quality raw materials. Ash Grove Materials experienced one such situation a few years ago with the advent of a new type of raw material. Concrete producers had for years used only one or two of four differing cementious materials in a concrete mix designs. Those materials were, Portland cement commonly called cement, Class C fly ash commonly called C ash, obtained from lignite or sub-bituminous coal fired power plants, Class F fly ash commonly called F ash, obtained from anthracite or bituminous coal fired power plants and Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag commonly called slag, obtained from iron and steel smelting operations. Sometime in 2001 a new ...