Ethical Dilemmas in Business

Before you read

Discuss this question:

What is business ethics?

Now read the article. What does it say about the question above?

Roger Worsham had just graduated as an accounting major with an MBA degree and had landed a job with a small regional accounting firm in northern Michigan. Working there would give him the experience he needed to qualify as a certified public accountant (CPA). He, his wife, and their two small children settled in to enjoy small-town life. Roger’s employer was experiencing tough competition from large accounting firms that were able to offer more varied services, including management consulting, computerized data processing services, and financial advice. Losing a big client could mean the difference between staying open or closing down one of the local offices.

During one of his first audit assignments of a local savings and loan (S&L) company, Roger uncovered evidence of fraud. The S&L was restricted by law at that time to mortgages based on residential property, but it had loaned money to a manufacturing company. To conceal this illegal loan from Roger, someone had removed the file before he began the audit. Roger suspected that the guilty party might have been the S&L president, who, in addition to being the largest owner of the manufacturing firm, was also a very influential lawyer in town.

Roger took the evidence of wrongdoing to his boss, expecting to hear that the accounting firm would include it in the audit report, as required by standard accounting practices. Instead, he was told to put the evidence and all of his notes through a shredder. His boss said, “I will take care of this privately. We simply cannot afford to lose this client.” When Roger hesitated, he was told, “You put those papers through the shredder or I’ll guarantee that you’ll never get a CPA in Michigan, or work in an accounting office in this state for the rest of your life.”

Question: If you were Roger, what would you do? If you were Roger’s boss, would you have acted differently? What is the ethical thing to do?

Ethics is a conception of right and wrong conduct. Ethics tells us when our behavior is moral and when it is immoral. Ethics deals with fundamental human relationships – how we think and behave toward others and how we want them to think and behave toward us. Ethics principles are guides to moral behavior. For example, in most societies lying, stealing, deceiving, and harming others are considered to be unethical and immoral. Honesty, keeping promises, helping others, and respecting the rights of others are considered to be ethically and morally desirable behavior. Such basic rules of behavior are essential for the preservation and continuation of organized life everywhere.

These notions of right and wrong come from many sources. Religious beliefs are a major source of ethical guidance for many. The family institution – whether two parents, a single parent, or a large family with brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, cousins, and other kin – imparts a sense of right and wrong to children as they grow up. Schools and schoolteachers, neighbors and neighborhoods, friends, admired role models, ethnic groups – and of course, the ever-present television – influence what we believe to be right and wrong in life. The totality of these learning experiences creates in each person a concept of ethics, morality, and socially acceptable behavior. This core of ethical beliefs then acts as a moral compass that helps to guide a person when ethical puzzles arise.

Ethical ideas are present in all societies, all organizations, and all individual persons, although they may vary greatly from one to another. Your ethics may not be exactly the same as your neighbor’s, or one particular religion’s notion of morality may not be identical to another’s, or what is considered ethical in one society may be forbidden in another society. These differences raise the important and controversial issue of ethical relativism, which is the question of whether ethical principles should be defined by various periods of time in history, a society’s traditions, the special circumstances of the moment, or personal opinion. If so, the meaning given to ethics would be relative to time, place, circumstance, and the person involved. In the case, there would be no universal ethical standards on which people around the globe could agree.

Reading tasks

A. Understanding main points. Answer these questions:

1. What is ethics?

2. What are fundamental human relationships?

3. What is considered to be unethical?

4. Where do the notions of right and wrong come from?

5. How may ethical ideas vary from one another?

6. What is ethical relativism?

7. What is the meaning given to ethics relative to?

8. Which institutions create the notions of right and wrong?

B. Understanding details. Mark these statements T (true) or F (false) according to the information in the text. Find the part of the text that gives the correct information:

1. Roger worked with an accounting firm to acquire the experience.

2. Losing a big client could result in closing down one of the local offices.

3. The guilty party is the S & L president.

4. Roger’s boss included the evidence of wrongdoing in the audit report.

7. Ethics deals with fundamental human relations.

8. Harming others is immoral.

9. Ethics is the same in all organizations.

C. Five sentences have been removed from the text. Read the text and insert each sentence in its appropriate position:

1. Roger suspected the S & L president.

2. Someone has removed the file.

3. Roger worked with a small regional accounting firm.

4. Roger took the evidence to his boss.

5. Roger’s employer was experiencing tough competition.

Vocabulary tasks

A. Match the opposites:

B. Match these words as they occur in the text:

C. Word fields

Write these words in the appropriate column:

fraud, illegal loan, wrongdoing, honesty, lying, stealing, helping others, deceiving, keeping promises, respecting the rights of others, harming others.

Moral Immoral

Role play

Unit 19

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1149