Review attachments.

Each question (2) must be minimum 200 words.

Use only the references attached.

It is important to write concisely, provide the chapter title, chapter heading, page, or paragraph number.  Include in-text citations and a reference in a reference list.   To see how to cite the eBook, go to Content and view the module, Learn to Use APA.  The citation and reference information is on the right-side of the screen.

Discussion #1:  Generally speaking, it is illegal to make hiring decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. If you are the owner of a restaurant that features Thai food, are you breaking the law by hiring cooks and wait staff who are of Asian descent?  Be sure to support your position through the use of course resources.

Discussion #2:  Christine Porath, author of the article, “The Silent Killer of Workplace Happiness, productivity, and Health Is a Lack of Basic Civility”, offers advice to leaders and managers who may want to craft more civil cultures.   She posits that toxic people should be weeded out before they join the organization by interviewing for civility, using structured interviews with behavioral questions.  She also suggests that references be checked thoroughly, but to also go beyond checking provided references and to chase leads and hunches.  Develop and discuss a minimum of 3 behavioral questions that you believe might help identify toxic people before they are hired.  Be sure to support your response.

Week 3: Ethical Treatment of Employees – Workplace Culture

Theme 1:  Safety/Civility

Your Person

·

OSHA’s Wall of Shame: Agency Targets ‘Severe Violators’

·

The Top 10 Bizarre Workers’ Compensation Cases for 2015

Your Psyche

·

Kareem Hunt faces more than baseline six-game suspension

·

The silent killer of workplace happiness, productivity, and health is a lack of basic civility

·

Chris Porath – “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto in the Workplace,” WJLA Interview

Your Money

·

Thinking About Using Payroll Debit Cards? Read This First

·

New Overtime Rules Suspended for Now

·

Are ESOPs Good Retirement Plans?

Theme 2:  Freedom From Discrimination

Illegal Discrimination

·

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Supreme Court: A Legal Analysis of Young v. U nited Parcel S ervice

·

Legal discrimination in four letters: BFOQ

·

The strange loophole that lets Hooters hire only female servers

·

Is it okay to hire cooks to match the cuisine? (part I)

·

Resources Legal Alerts Newsletters Articles Blogs Mobile Apps Subject-Matter Booklets State Law Guides Newsletter PDF EEOC Settles Beef With Restaurant

Legal Discrimination

·

The Hidden Obstacle to Great Corporate Culture: Unconscious Bias

·

Former Hooters Waitress Awarded $250,000 in Racial Discrimination Case

·

Lifestyle Discrimination: Is it Legal?

·

8 Ways Employers Can Discriminate Against Workers – Legally

·

Anne Arundel Medical Center Won’t Hire Smokers In The Future

·

Pay Transparency Is The Solution To The Pay Gap: Here’s One Company’s Success Story

·

If a Law Bars Asking Your Past Salary, Does It Help or Hurt?

·

Employers Must Use Caution When Basing Pay Decisions On Prior Salary History

·

Schumpeter: ESOP – When Workers Are Owners

·

Employee Rights When Working for Multinational Employers

·

EU to push for 40% quota for women on company boards

·

EU workplace headscarf ban ‘can be legal’, says ECJ

Chapter8: Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers from The Business Ethics

Workshop was adapted by Saylor Academy and is available under a Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license without attribution as requested by

the work’s original creator or licensor. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under
the original license.

http://www.saylor.org/site/textbooks/The%20Business%20Ethics%20Workshop

https://creativecommon

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org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

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Chapter 8

Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing
Workers

Chapter Overview

Chapter 8 “Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers” examines some ethical decisions

facing managers. It considers the values that underlie and guide the hiring, promoting, and firing of

workers.

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8.1 Hiring

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Locate ethical tensions affecting the breadth of a hiring search.

2. Define applicant screening and mark its ethical boundaries.

3. Define applicant testing and consider what makes an appropriate test.

4. Draw the lines of an ethical interview process.

Help Wanted, but from Whom?

The Central Intelligence Agency’s hiring practices are widely known and well depicted in the movie The

Recruit. After discretely scouting the special capabilities of a young bartender played by Colin Ferrell, Al

Pacino catches him at work, orders a drink, carries on a one-sided and cryptic conversation, performs a

magic trick with a ripped newspaper, announces that “things are never quite as they appear,” and finally

admits that he’s actually a job recruiter.

Ferrell seems annoyed by the man’s presence.

Pacino returns to the newspaper, pulls out a page covered by an ad announcing “Two Day Specials.” He

circles the letters c, i, and a in “Specials” and walks out. Colin Ferrell follows.
[1]

Actually, that’s not true. The CIA doesn’t hire that way. They advertise on CareerBuilder just like any

other company. You can understand, though, why they wouldn’t mind scouting out their applicants even

before allowing people to apply; they don’t want to end up hiring double agents.

Something like that happened soon after Procter & Gamble grew jealous of a competitor’s hair-care

products. Salon Selective, Finesse, and Thermasilk were all doing so well for Unilever that P&G contracted

people to get hired over at Unilever and bring back secrets of their success. The corporate espionage—

which P&G executives characterized as a “rogue operation”—led to a multimillion-dollar settlement

between the companies and left behind the lesson that when you’re the boss and you’re hiring, you’ve got

to make sure that the people you bring in will be loyal to the company.
[2]

The problem is you’ve also got to make sure that they’re going to do good work, the best work possible.

Between the two requirements there’s a tension stretching through every decision to hire a new worker.

On one side, you want to limit the people you even consider to those few who, for one reason or another,

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you know won’t be a total disaster. On the other side, no company can survive playing it safe all the time;

generally, the corporations able to hire the best talent will win over the long run.

And

one way to get the

best talent is to cast as large a net as possible, let a maximum number know that a position is available,

and work through the applications carefully no matter how many pour in.

Conclusion. Hiring employees can be safe or risky depending on how broadly you announce a job opening.

Three Strategies for Announcing a Job Opening: Nepotism, Internal Public

Announcement, Mass Public Announcement

Start on the safe side of hiring. Nepotism is granting favored status to family members. In the case of

hiring, it means circulating information about open jobs only to your relatives. Naturally this happens at

many small businesses. A sales representative at a small firm importing auto accessories meets a woman

at work. She’s also a rep. Marriage follows. A year later he decides to quit his job and strike out on his own

with a new website project that reviews and sells the same kind of car products. Things go well, page hits

climb, sales increase, and soon he needs help so he hires…his wife. They’ve worked together before, and

they both know the field. Most important, the risk is minimal. Since he’s waking up with her in the

morning he can figure she’s not going to skip out on work just because it’s a nice spring day. And is she

going to steal office supplies? A little money from the payroll? An important client? Probably not. This is a

case where nepotism makes sense.

But what about the other way? What if the husband’s solo venture flops, and at the same time, his wife’s

career flourishes. Now he needs a job, and she’s got the power to hire. A job opens up. Probably, she’s got

junior staff ready for the post, but can she push them aside and bring her husband in?

There is some justification: she’s worked with him before, and she knows he performs well. Plus, as a boss

of his own (failed) business, he’s obviously got leadership experience and he has demonstrated initiative.

All that counts for something. But if she goes with him she’s going to breed resentment in her group. You

can hear it:

“Hey, what do you need to get a promotion around here?”

“A last name.”

And

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Now you might be asking why nepotism bugs me so much. It’s the presumption. It’s the attitude.

It’s just one more example of how life isn’t fair. Am I jealous? I don’t know. I guess I take

advantage of the company in other ways…LOL. What can I learn from this? That life is good if

you’re born into the right family? That I need to control my attitude and stop letting petty crap

drive me to drink?
[3]

That last paragraph comes from a blog entry titled “Nepotism Sucks.” It does for his company too: few

firms can be successful with employees musing about how they “take advantage of the company” while

they’re punctuating comments about their work with LOL. As for the central issue, he’s right. Basic

fairness isn’t being honored: people are getting considered for a job because of who they’re related to, and

it’s not this blogger’s fault that his last name is wrong.

On the other hand, “Is Nepotism So Bad?” titles an article on Forbes.com that compiles a list of large

companies—including Forbes—where nepotism has been the norm…and successful. According to the

article, experts estimate that executive-level nepotism works out about 40 percent of the time. What are

the advantages to bringing in your own? Familiarity with the business and trust are noted. Another

advantage is also underlined: frequently, relatives don’t want to let their own relatives down. Sons work

harder for fathers, cousins for cousins, brothers for sisters. There’s a productivity advantage in nepotism.

Arguably, that factor weighs more heavily than the bitterness arising when deserving workers already

employed don’t get a chance to apply for a job because it already went to the boss’s sister-in-law.
[4]

Finally, at least theoretically, there’s a creative solution to the bitterness caused by nepotism: make

virtually every post a nepotism-first position. Oil-Dri, a producer of absorbent materials, celebrated its

fiftieth anniversary with a party for all employees. “Would everyone,” the group was asked at one point,

“who is related to someone else in the company please stand up?” Of the seven hundred employees, about

five hundred left their seats.

Internal public job announcements occupy a middle spot on the continuum between playing it safe (only

letting selected people you’re certain will be loyal and at least moderately capable know when a job is

available) and going for the best talent (broadcasting the post as broadly as possible and accepting

applications from anyone).

An example of an internal public job announcement comes from the National Review, a political

magazine and website run by the kind of people who wear suits and ties to baseball games. Their blog is

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called The Corner, and the magazine’s editors fill it with thoughts and arguments about the day’s political

debates in Washington, DC. There’s also a bit of insider humor, provocation, and satire tossed back and

forth between posters. If you keep reading for a few weeks, you’ll start to sense an intellectual soap opera

developing along with the libertarian-conservative politics; there’s an undercurrent of shifting alliances,

snarkiness, and thoughtful jabs.

You’ll also notice that National Review places job announcements on The Corner blog. There aren’t a lot

of openings, but every couple of weeks a little announcement appears between posts.

The National Review Online is seeking an editor with web capabilities. Send applications to

____@nationalreview.com.

It’s pretty ingenious. The only people who are going to be reading The Corner are

 sincerely interested in the wonkish subjects these guys publish about;

 not out there just looking for any job (at the time they see the announcement, they’re not looking for a job

at all because it’s not a job site);

 compatible on a personal level with the National Review crew. The posters let personalities shine

through, and if you don’t have chemistry with their style of humor and talk, you’re simply not going to be

reading them.

What an internal public job announcement seeks to do is get the most applications in the hopper as

possible, and so the announcement is published on a free Internet page that anyone can see. That’s the

public part. But because the page is only commonly followed by people who are already inside the world

of public policy defining the employees at National Review, the bosses don’t need to worry about the

wrong kind of people sending in résumés. That’s the “internal” part. Recruiters can get a lot of

applicants—increasing their chances of finding really talented people—without worrying too much about a

bunch of lefties who really prefer websites like Daily Kos trying to fake their way into the organization.

Mass public job announcements are just what they sound like. You need someone and you post the

position at Monster, CareerBuilder, and The Ladders. Here you’re giving up confidence that applicants

will fit into the organization naturally, and you’re even risking corporate spying moles like those that

infested Unilever. In exchange, however, you’re getting the broadest selection possible of people to toss

their hat into the ring, which maximizes your chances of finding stellar work performance.

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Beyond the advantage of many applicants, there are good ethical arguments for mass public job

announcements. The simplest is fair play: everyone should get an equal opportunity to take a run at any

job. Just past that, there are concerns about discrimination that are eased by mass announcements. While

there’s no reason to launch charges of inherent racism at nepotistic hiring practices, it might well be true

that if a small business is initiated by an Asian family, and they start hiring relatives, the result at the end

of the day is a racial imbalance in the company. Again, no one is equating nepotism with racism, but the

appearance can develop fairly easily whenever job announcements are not publicized as widely as

possible. The parallel case can be made with respect to internal public job announcements. If 90 percent

of the people who come in contact with the “help wanted” message happen to be women, sooner or later,

there’s going to be some guy out there who complains. So, one argument in favor of mass announcements

is the stand it helps take against illegal and unethical discrimination.

Another argument for mass announcements is reciprocity. If a company is trying to sell a product to the

general public, to anyone who’s willing to pay money for it, then shouldn’t they allow everyone a shot at

becoming an employee? It doesn’t seem quite right to profit from anyone—to try to sell, say, a car to

anyone who walks in the door—and then turn around and not give all those consumers a decent chance at

earning a living there at the dealership.

Conclusion. Announcing a job opening is not automatic. You can announce the spot more publicly or less

so. There are advantages and disadvantages to the various approaches, but there’s always an ethical

responsibility to clearly account for the reasons why one approach is selected over another.

Ethical Perils of Job Announcements

Ethical perils of job announcements include

1. describing a position in ways that don’t correspond with the reality,

2. announcing a post to people who really have no chance for the job.

Once you’ve identified the demographic pool you’d like to recruit from, it’s easy to oversell the job in the

announcement you post. The most blatant cases—You can earn $300 per hour working from home!—are

obvious frauds, but even sincere attempts can cause misunderstandings. Say a job requires “occasional

travel.” Fine, but does that mean occasionally during the year or occasionally during the month?

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The much more severe case of insincerity in job announcements is posting one before an audience that

has no reasonable chance of getting the job. When Hooters posts a “server wanted” sign, we all know what

they’re looking for just like when the rough bar next door advertises for a bouncer. But what if it’s a formal

restaurant advertising for a waiter? If the place is across town, you can’t just drop in to check out the kind

of people they hire. So maybe you go through the application process and make the telephone calls and

finally go in for the interview. As you walk through the door, the first thing they check out is your weight

profile. Then your jaw line, haircut, eyes, and the rest. They want to see how you compare with the other

waiters who all look like they model on the side.

If you’re lucky, you see yourself fitting right in, but if you’re like most of us, you know the interview’s over

before it started; the whole thing has been a huge waste of time.

Now put yourself on the other side. As the restaurant manager trying to fill the position, you know

you should put the requirement that applicants be devastatingly handsome into the ad. The duty to be

honest requires it. The duty to treat others as an end and not a means requires it. The idea that our acts

should be guided by the imperative to bring the greatest good to the greatest number requires it. Almost

every mainstream ethical theory recommends that you tell the truth about what you’re looking for when

you announce a job. That way you don’t waste peoples’ time, and you spare them the humiliation of being

treated as irrelevant. So you should want to put in the ad something about how only potential movie stars

need apply.

But the law virtually requires that you don’t put the line in. If you explicitly say you’ll only consider

exceptionally attractive men for your job, you open yourself to a slew of lawsuits for unfair and

discriminatory hiring practices. In fact, even Hooters aren’t safe. In 2009 the chain was sued by a Texas

man named Nikolai Grushevski because they refused to hire servers who looked, well, like him. When it

gets to that point—when hairy guys can get away with calling lawyers because they aren’t hired to serve

food in short shorts and halter tops—you can understand why restaurants don’t want to publicly admit

exactly what they’re looking for.
[5]

Bottom line: if Hooters just comes out and states what it is that makes their kind of employee, they can get

sued. So they’re much better off just making the announcement ambiguous. That way, when it turns out

that no hairy guys ever seem to get hired, they can always say it’s because they didn’t seem so adept at

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dodging tables while shooting around with trays of beers and sandwiches. Or whatever. One lie is as good

as another so long as it keeps the restaurant out of the courtroom.

For managers, this is a tight spot. They’re caught between what’s right and the law. In ethical terms,

they’re stretched between two conflicting duties: to tell the truth and to get the famous Hooters Girls into

the restaurant.

Screening

Reducing a large pool of applicants to a manageable selection of people for serious consideration

is applicant screening, sometimes referred to as filtering. Screening begins with the job announcement.

Requirements like “three or more years of experience” and “willingness to work the night shift” go a long

way toward eliminating applicants.

It’s impossible, though, to completely define the perfect applicant beforehand, and even if you could,

there’s almost always going to be someone like Nikolai Grushevski who shows up. So screening continues

as the preliminary review of applications and applicants to see who can be quickly crossed off the list

without any serious consideration.

Legally, who can be crossed out? The default response is no one. In its broadest form, civil rights

employment law guarantees equal opportunity. All applicants deserve to be considered and

evaluated solely on their ability to do the job, and the federal government’s Equal Employment

Opportunity Commission is stocked with lawyers who are out there doing their best to make sure the rules

are upheld. For managers, that means they’ve got to take all applicants seriously; they’ve got to pursue

interview questions about ability, training, experience, and similar. Now, this is where a guy like

Grushevski can come in the door and say, “Look, I can deliver a round of burgers and beer as well as any

woman.” He’s probably right. Still, he’s not the right person for the job; there’s no reason for a manager to

lose valuable time dealing with him.

Similarly, a wheelchair-bound man shouldn’t be a beach lifeguard; an eighty-year-old shouldn’t be flying

commercial jetliners; the seven foot one and 330-pound Shaquille O’Neil isn’t going to be a horse jockey.

There is a legal way for companies to summarily screen out inappropriate applicants: by appealing

tobona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs). BFOQs are exceptions granted to equal opportunity

requirements. A form of legalized discrimination, they let managers cross off job applicants for reasons

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that are normally considered unfair: gender, physical size, religious belief, and similar. (As a note, race

isn’t allowed to be considered a BFOQ.)

When do bosses get this easy way out? When they can show that the otherwise discriminatory practices

are required because of a business’ nature. So while it’s clear that Shaquille O’Neil’s intimidating size

doesn’t mean he’ll be a bad accountant, the nature and rules of horse racing require that riders be

diminutive, and that means Shaq would be a disaster. A horse owner can show that the job requires a

physically little person to be successful. Thus size becomes a BFOQ and a legitimate way of screening

applicants for that particular

job.

A maker of men’s clothes can reasonably screen out women from the applicant pool for models—but they

can’t eliminate female applicants from consideration for a sales position. Or they could, but only if they

could show that maintaining a masculine public image was integral to the success of the company. For

example, you could imagine a company called Manly Incorporated, which sold products based on the

premise that every employee was a quality control officer.

Along similar lines, a Catholic school may screen atheists from the search for a teacher, but it’s harder to

justify that filter for janitors. At the airport security line women can be assigned to pat down women and

men to men, but either may apply for the job to hand check the carry-on bags.

Another common screen is education. Imagine you have just opened a local franchise of Jan-Pro, which

offers commercial cleaning services to car dealerships, gyms, banks, churches, and schools.
[6]

What level

of education will you be looking for in potential employees? Since the job involves mixing chemicals, it

seems like requiring some basic education is a fair demand, but is a college degree necessary for the work?

You may have one as a manager, but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily demand that much from

employees. And on the other side, is it fair to screen out someone who’s got too much education, say a

master’s degree in chemistry? It does seems reasonable to suspect that this kind of person will soon

become bored pushing a vacuum over carpets.

Then again, do you know that will happen? Is it fair to screen based on what you suspect might occur?

Another type of screening catches high-risk lifestyles. Smoking is one of the most often cited, and the

Humana company in Ohio is one of a growing number that’s directly banning smoking—on or off work—

by new employees.
[7]

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These healthy lifestyle policies set off firestorms of ethical debates. With respect to smoking and in broad

strokes, the company has an interest in prohibiting smoking because that should mean healthier workers,

fewer sick days, lower health insurance premiums, and higher productivity. In short: better working

workers. On the other side, job applicants (at least the smokers) don’t believe that they’re less productive

than everyone else, and anyway, they resent being excluded for a recreational habit pursued on their own

time. In long discussion boards—there are hundreds online—the debate plays out. Here’s one exchange

from a typical board:

bonos_rama:

I wouldn’t hire anyone that has a habit of leaving their desk every hour to stand outside for

10 minutes. Doesn’t matter if it’s to smoke, drink coke, or pass gas that they’re leaving, it’s

bad for productivity.

Mother of a

Dr.:

But it’s OK to stand by the coffee pot and discuss sports and politics? Productivity actually

improves when you get away from the computer every hour.

matt12341:

Even discounting the productivity argument, smokers tend to have more long-term health

problems, leading to higher insurance premiums so companies end up paying more.

jamiewb:

What if we apply this logic to people who are overweight? What about people who have a

family history of cancer? Or a higher incidence of diabetes? As long as it doesn’t impact job

performance, I don’t think it’s fair to refuse to hire smokers.

happily-

retired:

I think it is a great idea to not hire smokers. Up next should be obesity, as it leads to diabetes,

heart problems, joint problems, etc. Companies following that path would be demonstrating

good corporate citizenship by fostering a healthier America.

Zom Zom:

Yes, the good citizenship of fascism. Now my employer has the right to dictate what I do with

my body? “Land of the free,” unless your boss doesn’t like the choices you make.
[8]

You can see that underneath the back-and-forth, this is ultimately a debate about ethical perspectives.

One side tends toward a utilitarian position: the greater good in terms of health and related issues justifies

the filtering of smokers in hiring decisions. The other side tends toward a fundamental rights position:

what I do with my time and body is my decision only. Both sides have strong arguments.

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Criminal record screening is another common filter for job applicants. Most states won’t allow employers

to deny someone fair consideration for a job only because of a prior criminal conviction. There’s wiggle

room, though. In New York, Article 23-A of the correction law certifies that employment may be denied if

 there’s a direct relationship between the criminal offense committed and the employment sought,

 the applicant would pose an unreasonable risk to property or the safety or welfare of others.

Those are big loopholes. The first one means the Brinks armored car company can legally refuse to

consider ex-bank robbers for a position. It may also apply to the shoplifter who wants to be a cashier or

the drug dealer who wants a job in the pharmacy.

The second exception is still broader and applied in Grafter v. New York City Civil Service

Commission.
[9]

In that case, the Fire Department of New York refused to hire Grafter because he’d been

caught drunk driving on his last job. A potentially drunken fireman does seem like a risk to the welfare of

others. Pushing that further out, the same would probably go if he applied to be a taxi driver. In fact, the

list of jobs that may seem dangerous for others if the worker is drunk extends a long way, probably

everything in construction, transportation, or anything with heavy equipment. So the law does allow

employers to resist hiring convicts across a significant range of wrongdoing.

Finally, the basic ethical tension pulls in three competing directions for any manager facing a criminal

hiring decision:

1. The ethical responsibility to recovering criminals. Rehabilitation (via honest work) is good for ex-

convicts.

2. The manager’s responsibility to the company. Managers need to avoid problems whenever

possible and keep the machine running smoothly so profits flow smoothly too.

3. The company’s responsibility to the general public. If a taxi syndicate is hiring ex-drunk drivers,

you’ve got to figure something’s going to go wrong sooner or later, and when it does, the person who put

the driver behind the wheel will be partially responsible.

Social media is another potential filter. Fifty-six percent of millennial believe that the words and pictures

they put on Facebook and Twitter shouldn’t be allowed to factor into hiring decisions.
[10]

Recruitment

officers, they’re saying, shouldn’t be going through online photo albums to check out the kinds of things

you and your buddies do on Friday nights.

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From the employers’ side, however, the argument in favor of checking the pages is simple. If an applicant

is sufficiently incautious to leave pictures of massive beer funnel inhalations available for just anyone to

see—and if they do that while they’re trying to put their best face forward as job seekers—then God knows

what kind of stuff will be circulating once they’ve got a job. As a manager, it’s part of your job to protect

the company’s public image, which means you’ve got to account for clients and others maybe running the

same Google and Facebook searches that you are.

It’s an easy scenario to imagine: you hire someone with a flamboyant online life. Soon after, a client

working with her gets nosey does a Google image search, and what comes in at the top of the list is a

picture of your new employee slamming beers, chain-smoking cigarettes, or maybe inhaling something

that’s not legal. This isn’t good and the person who looks really bad is the supposedly mature manager

who allowed the whole thing to happen by hiring her.

Of course there’s always the standard but still powerful argument that what employees do after hours is

their own business, but one of the realities inherent in the Internet is that there is no such thing as “after

hours” anymore. Once something goes online, it’s there all the time, forever. Managers need to take

account of that reality, which might mean rethinking old rules about privacy.

Testing

Once an ad has been placed, and applicants have been pooled, and the pool has been screened, the real

hard work of hiring begins: choosing from among apparently qualified people. One tool used in the

selection process is applicant testing. There are various sorts of tests, but no matter the kind, for it to be

legitimate; it should itself pass three tests. It ought to be

 Valid. The test must measure abilities connected to the specific job being filled. A prospective roadie for

Metallica shouldn’t be asked to demonstrate mastery of Microsoft Excel, just as there’s no reason to ask an

accountant to wire up his cubicle with speakers blasting 115 decibels.

 Normalized. The test must be fair in the sense that results are adjusted for the circumstances of the

testing session. If you’re checking to see how frequently applicants for the post of TV weatherman have

predicted sunshine and it turned out to rain, and one woman gets tested in Phoenix while another takes

Seattle, it’s pretty easy to see who’s going to win in terms of raw numbers. Those numbers need to be

adjusted for the divergent levels of difficulty.

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 Constant. The results any test taker achieves over time should be similar. Just like a broken clock is right

twice a day, an applicant for an interior design job who happens to be color-blind might once in a while

throw together a carpet-sofa combination that doesn’t clash. A good test eliminates the lucky hits, and

also the unlucky ones.

Of the many kinds of hiring tests now in use, the most direct try to measure the exact skills of the

job. Skill tests can be simple. They’re also relatively easy to control for validity, normalization, and

constancy. For example, applicants for a junior-level position in copyediting at a public relations firm may

be given a poorly written paragraph about a fictional executive and asked to fix up the spelling and

grammar.

Psychological and personality tests are murkier; it’s more difficult to show a direct link between the

results and job performance. On one side, you’ve got a test that probes your inspirations and fears, your

tastes and personal demons. On the other side, the test’s goal is to reveal how well you can handle plain

work assignments. Here’s an example of the disconnect. The following is a true-or-false question that

Rent-A-Center placed on one of its employee application tests: I have no difficulty starting or holding my

bowel movement.
[11]

Well, it’s hard to see the link between bathroom performance and the ability to rent washer and drier sets.

Rent-A-Center wouldn’t be asking, though, if they didn’t think the link was there. And they could be right;

there may be some connection. One of the firmest sources of belief in the link between personality profile

and job performance is the very interesting Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). That

specific test is the origin of the bathroom question. Other true-or-false choices on the long test include the

following:

 I am very attracted to members of my own sex.

 Evil spirits possess me sometimes.

Now, the MMPI is a real test with a long and noble history. One of the things it tries to do is

establish correspondences. That is, if we take a group of successful executives at Rent-A-Center and we

discover that they nearly universally have trouble in the bathroom, then it may make sense to look for

people who suffer this discomfort when looking to recruit future company leaders. As for the why

question—as in why is there a link between bathroom habits and success?—that doesn’t matter for a

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correspondence test; all that matters is that some link is there. And if it is, then you know where to look

when you’re hiring.

Theoretically, correspondence testing makes sense. Still, it’s hard to know how applicants are going to

react to questions about sexual attraction and evil spirits. Obviously, some are going to find the whole

thing too weird and not turn in responses that actually match their profile. As for applicants and

employees of Rent-A-Center, they filed a lawsuit.
[12]

Inescapably, correspondence-type personality tests are vulnerable to lawsuits because they’re explicitly

based on the premise that no one knows why the results indicate who is more and less suitable for a post.

The administrators only know—or at least they think they know—that the correspondence is there. It’s not

obvious, however, like it is with a simple skill test, so it makes sense to imagine that some are going to

doubt that the test is valid; they’re going to doubt that it really shows who’s more and less qualified for a

job.

So the problems with psychological tests include validity failure and lawsuits. Problems with constancy

and normalization could also be developed. Added to that, there are invasion of privacy questions that are

going to get raised whenever you start asking perspective employees about their bathroom habits and

bedroom wishes.

On the other hand, it needs to keep being emphasized that the tests do happen, and that’s not a

coincidence. At the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park, recruiter Nathan Giles reports that the tests

he administers—with true-or-false questions including “It’s maddening when the court lets guilty

criminals go free”—actually do produce valuable results. They correlate highly, he says, with personal

interviews: if you do well on the test, you’re going to do well face to face. And though the application and

interpretation of these tests are expensive, in the long run they’re cheaper than interviewing everyone.

Finally, if that’s true, then don’t managers have a responsibility to use the tests no matter how heated the

protests?
[13]

Lie detectors in the Hollywood sense of wires hooked up to the fingers for yes-or-no interrogations are

illegal except in highly sensitive and limited cases, usually having to do with money (bank guards) and

drugs (pharmaceutical distribution). Written honesty tests are legal. Generally, the questions populating

these exams resemble those found on psychological tests, and deciphering the results again works through

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correlation. Obviously, the test can’t work directly since both honest and dishonest people will answer

“yes” to the question “are you honest?” Here are some typical questions that do get asked:

 I could help friends steal from my company.

 I’m not an honest person and might steal.

 I return quarters I find on the street to the police station.

Medical tests are generally only considered appropriate when the specific job is labor intensive. As always,

there’s a difference between testing and prying, and it’s your responsibility as a manager to limit the

questioning to specifically work-related information. Questions about past physical problems are

generally considered off limits as are future problems that may be indicated by family health history. A

simple example of an appropriate medical test would be a vision examination for a truck driver.

When Michael Phelps—the thick-grinned Olympic swimming hero—got photographed pulling on a bong,

he immediately failed the drug test with one of his employers: Kellogg’s breakfast cereal. He wouldn’t be

hired again, the company explained, because smoking pot “is not consistent” with the company’s image.

The National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws rushed to disagree, insisting that the problem’s

not that the drugs are bad; it’s the law that’s outdated and wrongheaded. They were supported, NORML

claims, by the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
[14]

However that might be, it’s seems difficult to object to Kellogg’s argument. The reason they’d hire Michael

Phelps in the first place is to brand their product with the image of beaming, young health, not zoning out

in front of the TV eating Doritos. Whether it’s legal or not, pot smoking is going to clash with the job

description.

But what if he hadn’t been caught by someone with a camera? Would Kellogg’s have the right to demand a

drug test before signing Phelps up as a representative? It depends where you are. Because there’s no

broad federal law on the subject, the rules change depending on your state, even your city. If you’re

looking for a job and you share a pastime with Michael Phelps, you may be in trouble in Alaska where any

employer can test any applicant at any moment. In Arizona, on the other hand, you have to get written

warning beforehand, which might allow for some cleanup. And if you’re applying for a government job in

Berkeley, California, you can party on because a local ordinance prohibits testing.
[15]

Looking at the Berkeley law allows a sense of the central ethical conflict. On one side, the employers’, the

obvious and strong argument is that drug use negatively affects work performance, so evaluating job

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prospects in terms of their future productivity implies, it almost requires, making sure they’re not

distracted or disoriented by drug habits. In contrast, the Berkeley ordinance persuasively states that

mandatory drug testing fails two distinct tests:

1. It assumes guilt instead of innocence.

2. It invades the individual’s privacy.

Deciding about drug tests seems to come down to deciding whose legitimate rights deserve higher billing:

the employer’s or the employee’s.

In 1971 the US Supreme Court banned intelligence quotient (IQ) testing except in very limited

circumstances after finding that the tests disparately affected racial minorities. Further, serious IQ tests

(as opposed to seven-question Internet quizzes) are extremely expensive to apply, so even if it were legal,

few employers would use the test with any frequency.

Conclusion. Tests applied by employers to job applicants include those probing skills, psychological

profile, honesty, medical condition, and drug use.

Interviewing

In 1998 the Indianapolis Colts had a very good problem. Holders of the top pick in the National Football

League draft, they had to choose between two exceptional players: two that everyone agreed radiated

Super Bowl talent. Both were quarterbacks. Peyton Manning had a better sense of the field and smoother

control of the ball; Ryan Leaf had a larger frame and more arm strength. Which would make the better

employee? The call was so close that the team with the second choice, the San Diego Chargers, didn’t care

much who the Colts selected; they’d be happy with either one.

The Colts didn’t have the luxury of letting the choice be made for them, and as draft day approached they

studied film of the players’ college games, poured over statistics, measured their size, speed, and how

sharply and accurately they threw the ball. Everything. But they couldn’t make a decision.

So they decided to interview both candidates. The key question came from Colts coach Jim Mora. He

asked the young men, “What’s the first thing you’ll do if drafted by the Colts?” Leaf said he’d cash his

signing bonus and hit Vegas with a bunch of buddies. Manning responded that he’d meet with the rest of

the Colts’ offense and start going over the playbook. Mora saw in Manning a mature football player ready

for the challenges of the sport at its highest level. In Leaf he saw an unpredictable kid.

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More than a decade later, Peyton Manning heads into another season as starting quarterback. Having won

the Super Bowl, set countless team and NFL passing records, and assured himself a spot in the NFL Hall

of Fame, you can understand that the Colts are happy with their selection.

Ryan Leaf has recently been indicted on burglary and drug charges in Texas. He got the news while in

Canada at a rehab clinic. As for football, after a rocky first few seasons, his performance collapsed entirely.

He hasn’t been on a field in years.

Interviews matter. Grades, recommendation letters, past successes, and failures on the job—all those

numbers and facts carry weight. But for most hiring decisions, nothing replaces the sense you get of a

candidate face to face; it’s the most human part of the process.

Because it’s so human, it’s also one of the most ethically treacherous. Two factors usually weigh heavily in

deciding which questions should and shouldn’t be asked:

1. Fairness

2. Pertinence

Fair questioning means asking similar questions to all applicants for a post. If the position is entry level,

many candidates will be young, inexperienced, and probably easily flustered. That’s normal. So too there’s

nothing necessarily wrong with trying to knock applicants off rhythm with a surprise or trick question.

The problem comes when one candidate gets pressed while another gets softballs.

What do tough questions look like? One answer comes from Google. There are always blog entries

circulating the Internet from applicants talking about the latest weird questions asked by that successful

and unpredictable company:

 How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

 You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your

original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60

seconds. What do you do?

 How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

 Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly

knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has.

The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is

unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day,

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the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What

happens?

 Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
[16]

We’re a long way from “why do you want to work at Google?” and even further from “what was your

biggest accomplishment or failure in your last job?” Those are softballs; anyone going into Google for an

interview is going to have prepared answers to those. It’s like reading from a script. But looking at the

hard questions Google actually poses, there is no script, and you can see how things could go south

quickly. You can’t figure out about golf balls and school buses, and you start to get nervous. Next, the

blender question seems odd and threatening, and it’s all downhill from there. Some interviews just don’t

go well and that’s it. As an applicant, you probably don’t have too much to complain about as long as the

next guy gets the same treatment. But if the next guy gets the softballs, the fairness test is getting failed.

As a manager, you can go hard or soft, but you can’t change up.

On the question of pertinent interview questions, the Google queries seem, on the face, to be troublesome.

Is there any job that requires employees to escape from a blender? No. But there are many jobs that

require employees to solve unfamiliar problems calmly, reasonably, and creatively. On that ground, the

Google questions seem perfectly justifiable as long as it’s assumed that the posts being filled require those

skills. By confronting prospective employees with unexpected problems demanding creative solutions,

they are, very possibly, rehearsing future job performance.

When the Colts were interviewing Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf, something similar happened at the key

moment. At first glance, it seems like the question about the first thing each player would do after draft

day wouldn’t reveal much about all the other days to come. But the guys probably weren’t prepared for the

question, and so they had to reveal how they’d face a rapidly shifting reality that they had no experience in

dealing with, a reality just like the one they’d face the day after the draft when they’d go from being college

students on campus to wealthy adults in the big world. That makes the question pertinent. And that

explains why the answers that came back were telling. They distinguished a great hire from one of the

sports world’s monumental bungles.

On the other side, what kinds of questions reveal employees’ personalities’ but not their job skills?

Interview consultants typically warn managers to avoid asking about these subjects:

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 Sex life

 Opinions about homosexuality

 Beliefs about contraception

 Personal finances

 Religious faith

 Political affiliations

Except in special circumstances (a job is with a church, a political party, or similar), these kinds of

questions fall under the category of privacy invasion.

Finally, there are legal red lines to respect. While managers should ensure that applicants are old enough

to work and so can confirm that people are, say, eighteen or older, it’s discriminatory in the legal sense to

hire one person instead of another because of an age difference. This means asking “how old are you?” is

an off-limits question. It’s also illegal to ask about citizenship, though you can ask whether applicants are

legally authorized to work in the United States. It’s illegal to ask about disabilities, except as they relate

directly to the job. It’s illegal to ask about past drug and alcohol use, though you may ask applicants

whether they are now alcoholics or drug addicts.

The interviewer’s fundamental responsibility is to choose the best applicant for the job while giving

everyone a fair shot. Being fair isn’t difficult; all you need to do is just ask everyone the standard

questions: Why do you want to work for our company? What are your strengths? How do you work with

others? Do you stay cool under pressure? The problem here, though, is that it’s easy to get gamed. It’s too

easy for applicants to say, “I love your company, I’m a team player, and I never get mad.” Since everyone

knows the questions and answers, there’s a risk that everything will be fake. And that makes identifying

the best applicant nearly impossible.

One response to this is to junk the standard questions and come up with surprising and (seemingly) crazy

questions like they do at Google. Another strategy is a different kind of interview. A situational or

behavioral interview asks candidates to show how they work instead of talking about it.

Here’s how it goes. Instead of asking an applicant, “Do you stay cool under pressure?” (the correct

response is “yes”), the question gets sharpened this way:

You know how jobs are when you need to deal with the general public: you’re always going to get

the lady who had too much coffee, the guy who didn’t sleep last night and he comes in angry and

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ends up getting madder and madder…at you. Tell me about a time when something like this

actually happened to you. What happened? How did you deal with it?

It’s harder to fake this. Try it yourself, try inventing a story. Unless you’re a real good liar, you’re going to

hear the slipperiness in your own voice, the uncertainty and stammering that goes with making things up.

Probably, most people who get hit with situational questions are going to opt for the easiest route, which

is tell the truth and see how it goes. So the advantage to this kind of interview is that it helps sort out

qualified candidates by giving an unvarnished look at how they confront problems. On the other side,

however, there’s also a disadvantage here, one coming from the fairness side. If candidate A has spent

years at the counter of Hertz and candidates B through G have all been working in the Hertz back office, of

course the counter person is going to do better.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 In publicizing a job opening, a tension exists between limiting the job announcement to ensure that

applicants are appropriate, and widely publicizing the announcement to ensure that applicants include

highly qualified individuals.

 Decisions about how broadly to publicize a job opening can be implemented through nepotism, internal

public job announcements, and mass public job announcements.

 Screening job applicants makes the hiring process more efficient but raises ethical

concerns.

 Common screening techniques involve BFOQs, educational requirements, high-risk lifestyles, criminal

record, and an applicant’s social media history.

 Testing allows applicants’ suitability for a post to be measured but raises ethical concerns.

 Common tests include skill tests, psychological and personality tests, honesty tests, medical tests, and

drug tests.

 Applicant interviewing provides valuable information for evaluating job candidates, but questions ought to

be fair and pertinent to job-related concerns.

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R E V I E W

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why might an employer opt for nepotism when hiring?

2. What is an advantage of a mass public job announcement?

3. Invent a job description that would allow applicants to be screened by a BFOQ.

4. Why might an applicant pool be screened for use of social media?

5. List the three requirements for a fair and legitimate job-applicant test.

6. How do psychological and personality tests work through correspondence?

7. Imagine a job and then an interview question for applicants that would not be pertinent and one that

would be pertinent.

8. Why might a behavioral interview be used?

[1] R. Donaldson (director), The Recruit (Burbank, CA: Touchstone Pictures, 2003), film.

[2] “Fortune: P&G Admits Spying on Hair Competitors,” Business Courier, August 30, 2001, accessed May 24,

2011,http://cincinnati.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2001/08/27/daily43.html.

[3] Marti’s Musings, “Nepotism Sucks,” August 30, 2004, accessed May 24,

2011,http://businessethicsworkshop.com/Chapter_8/Nepotism_sucks.html.

[4] Klaus Kneale, “Is Nepotism So Bad?,” Forbes, June 20, 2009, accessed May 24,

2011,http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/19/ceo-executive-hiring-ceonewtork-leadership-nepotism.html.

[5] “Texas Man Settles Discrimination Lawsuit Against Hooters for Not Hiring Male Waiters,” Fox News, April 21,

2009, accessed May 24, 2011,http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517334,00.html.

[6] “2011 Fastest-Growing Franchise,” Entrepreneur, accessed May 24,

2011,http://www.entrepreneur.com/franchises/fastestgrowing/index.html.

[7] Megan Wasmund, “Humana Enforces Mandatory Stop Smoking Program,” wcpo.com, June 16, 2009, accessed

June 7, 2011,http://www2.wcpo.com/dpp/news/local_news/Humana-Enforces-Mandatory-Stop-Smoking-

Program.

[8] “Humana: We Won’t Hire Smokers,” Newsvine.com, June 16,

2009,http://sorrelen.newsvine.com/_news/2009/06/16/2935298-humana-we-wont-hire-smokers.

[9] Grafter v. New York City Civil Service Commission, 1992.

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[10] Wei Du, “Job Candidates Getting Tripped Up By Facebook,” MSNBC.com, August 14, 2007, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20202935/page/2.

[11] Martin Carrigan, “Pre-Employment Testing—Prediction of Employee Success and Legal Issues,” Journal of

Business & Economics Research 5, no. 8 (August 2007): 35–44.

[12] Karraker v. Rent-A-Center, 2005.

[13] Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Employers Relying on Personality Tests to Screen Applicants, “Washington Post, March

27, 2005, accessed May 24, 2011,http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4010-2005Mar26.html.

[14] Paul Armentano, “The Kellogg Company Drops Michael Phelps, The Cannabis Community Drops

Kellogg’s,” NORML (blog), February 6, 2009, accessed May 24, 2011,http://blog.norml.org/2009/02/06/the-

kellogg-company-drops-michael-phelps-the-cannabis-community-drops-kelloggs.

[15] American Civil Liberties Union, “Testing Chart,” aclu.org, accessed May 24,

2011,http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/testing_chart .

[16] Michael Kaplan, “Want a Job at Google? Try These Brainteasers First,”CNNMoney.com, August 30,

2007,http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/29/technology/brain_teasers.biz2/index.htm.

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8.2 Wages

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Explore the limits of wage confidentiality.

2. Delineate the uses and ethics of wages as a work incentive.

Two Salary Issues Facing Managers

Two salary issues facing managers are wage confidentiality and the use of wages as a work incentive.

Starting with wage confidentiality, in the private sector it’s frequently difficult to discover what an

organization’s workers are paid. Because of freedom of information laws, many salaries in government

operations and contracting are available for public viewing, but in the private sector, there are no laws

requiring disclosure except in very specific circumstances.

The main ethical reason for keeping wage information concealed is the right to privacy: agreements struck

between specific workers and their companies are personal matters and will likely stay that way. Still,

ethical arguments can be mounted in favor of general disclosure. One reason is to defend against

managerial abuse. In a law firm, two paralegals may have similar experience, responsibilities, and

abilities. But Jane is single and living in a downtown apartment while John has just purchased a home

where his wife is living and caring for their newborn. Any boss worth his salt is going to see that Jane’s got

no local commitments and, who knows, she may just up and decide to spend a few months traveling, and

then make a run at living in some different city. Maybe she likes skiing and a few years in Denver don’t

sound bad. John, on the other hand, is tied down; he can’t just walk away from his job. He can always get

a new one, of course, but if money’s tight and a recession is on, there’s an incentive to raise Jane’s salary

to keep her and not worry so much about John who probably won’t be going anywhere anyway. That

seems to be taking unfair advantage of John’s personal situation, and it also seems like paying someone

for something beyond the quality of the work they actually do. But if no one knows what anyone else is

making, the boss may well get away with it.

Stronger, the boss may actually have an obligation to try to get away with it given his responsibility to

help the company maximize its success.

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Another argument against confidentiality is the general stand in favor of transparency, and in this case,

it’s transparency as a way of guaranteeing that ethical standards of equality are being met. Since the

signing of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, the ideal of “equal pay for equal work” has become a central business

ethics imperative in the United States. But it’s hard to know whether the equality is really happening

when no one knows how much anyone else is making.

Of course, workers do frequently know how much other people are getting. In an extreme case, if you’re

laboring in a union shop, it’s probable that your wage scale will be set identically to those of your

companions. Even if you’re not unionized, though, people still talk at the water cooler. The result is, in

practice, that some wage transparency is achieved in most places. From there, arguments can be mounted

for the expansion of that transparency, but in most cases, the weight of privacy concerns will carry the

day.

Another wage issue concerns its use to provide a work incentive. Many sales positions have the incentive

explicitly built in as the employees receive a percentage of the revenue they generate. (That’s why

salespeople at some department stores stick so close after helping you choose a pair of pants; they want to

be sure they get credit for the sale at checkout.) In other jobs, generating a motivation to work well isn’t

tremendously important. The late-night checkout guy at 7-Eleven isn’t going to get you out of the store

with cigarettes and a liter of Coke any faster just because his salary has been hiked a dollar an hour.

Between the two extremes, however, there are significant questions.

Probably, the main issue involving the use of wages as a carrot in the workplace involves clarity. It’s quite

common, of course, for managers to promise an employee or a team of workers a pay hike if they win a

certain account or meet productivity goals. Inevitably, the moment of the promise is warm and fuzzy—

everyone’s looking forward to getting something they want, and no one wants to sour things by

overbearingly demanding specifics. The problems come afterward, though, if the terms of the agreement

have been misunderstood and it begins to look like there’s an attempt to worm out of a promised salary

increase. It is management’s responsibility as the proposers of the accord to be sure the terms are clearly

stated and grasped all around:

 What, exactly, needs to be accomplished?

 How much, exactly, is the wage hike?

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The mirror image of promised wage hikes to encourage improved worker performance is the bonus paid

at year’s end to employees marking a job well done. In a letter to the editor of the Greensboro News-

Record in North Carolina, a teacher cuts to the central ethical problem of the bonus: on the basis of what

do some employees receive one while others don’t? Some teachers, the writer states, “at schools with high

‘at-risk’ populations and students coming from homes where education is just not valued, work

themselves into a tizzy every year, but because of the clientele they serve, will never see that bonus money.

Inversely, schools with middle-class clienteles have teachers who work hard, but also others who merely

go through the motions but usually can count on that bonus because their students come from homes that

think education matters. Where is the justice in this?”
[1]

It’s not clear where the justice is, but there’s no doubt that bonuses aren’t serving their purpose. The

problem here isn’t a lack of clarity. No one disputes that the rules for assigning a bonus are clear. The

problem is that the rules don’t seem to account for divergent working conditions and challenges.

The important point, finally, is that even though a bonus is extra money outside the basic salary structure,

that doesn’t mean it escapes the question, “Where’s the justice in this?,” coming with every decision about

who gets how much.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 Wage confidentiality pits the right to privacy against the desire for, and benefits of, transparency.

 Wages and bonuses are used to provide a work incentive, but problems arise when the pay increments

don’t obviously align well with promises or with job performance.

R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why might a company want to maintain wage confidentiality?

2. What is an example of a payment bonus becoming disconnected from work performance?

[1] Bill Toth, “Entire State ABC Bonus System Unfair,” News-Record.com, Letters to the Editor, August 19, 2008,

accessed May 24, 2011, http://blog.news-record.com/opinion/letters/archives/2008/08/.

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8.3 Promoting Employees

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Distinguish criteria for promoting employees.

2. Locate and define ethical issues relating to promotion.

The Drinking Strategy

If you want a promotion, does going out for drinks with the crew from work help the cause? Here’s a blog

post; it’s about two uncles—one who goes drinking with the crew and one who doesn’t—and you’ll see why

the answer might be yes:

Look at my uncles, they both work for Ford and one has been in his position for 10-plus years and

still doesn’t have a company car, while my other uncle has a company car, increase salary, paid

training. Even though he comes home to my auntie blinded drunk in the end it’s all worth it if you

want to be noticed.
[1]

Get hammered to get promoted! Too good to be true? Probably.

But not entirely, the Reason Foundation commissioned a report on the question of whether drinkers earn

more money than nondrinkers.
[2]

The title “No Booze? You May Lose” pretty much tells what the study

concluded about the link between social drinking with workmates and promotions. A few things should be

noted, though. Drinking doesn’t mean coming home blind drunk every night; it just means taking down

alcohol in some amount. And the payoff isn’t huge, but it is respectable: about 10 percent pay advantage

goes to the wet bunch compared to those workers who stay dry. The really interesting result, though, is

that guys who drink in bars at least once a month get another 7 percent pay advantage on top of the 10

percent. The bad news for drinking women is that for them, going to the bars doesn’t seem to help.

So there are two findings. First, just drinking is better than not drinking for your wallet. Second, at least

for men, drinking socially at bars is even better. One of the study’s authors, Edward Stringham, an

economics professor at San José State University, comments on the second result: “Social drinking builds

social capital. Social drinkers are networking, building relationships, and adding contacts to their

Blackberries that result in bigger paychecks.”
[3]

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Now, going back to the blog comment about the drunken uncle, isn’t this more or less what the blogger

sees too? Here are the next lines from the entry:

No senior management wants to promote a boring old fart. They want outgoing people, in and

outside of work. They want social people. If you can display your social abilities to them, it means

that you want more than the 9am to 5pm, thank God, time to go home. They want people who

enjoy working with the company and the people who they work for.
[4]

That sounds reasonable, and it may explain why there’s some serious scientific evidence that partying

with the workmates does, in fact, lead to promotions in the company.

The link between lifting a glass and moving up may be solid, but is it right? From the worker’s side,

there’s not a lot you can do about the situation so you may want to leave some Thursday and Friday

evenings available for happy hour regardless of whether you think that’s the way promotions ought to be

arranged. From management side, however, there is a stark issue here. When you sit down to look at two

candidates in your company for one promotion, do you have a right to consider how well they mix after

hours? Do you have a duty or responsibility to consider it?

There are two issues:

1. Should you consider a worker’s party aptitude?

2. If you do, how should you manage it?

The reasons for not considering party ability are many. Two stand out. First, workers are being paid for

what they do from nine to five. That’s the job. If you’re going to start considering other things, then why

stop at parties? You could give the promotion to the better player on the company softball team, or the

one who’s got curlier hair, or whatever. Second, workers may not have an equal opportunity to party. The

guy who lives closer to work and isn’t married obviously holds an advantage over the guy who has diabetes

when gin and tonics become job qualifications.

On the other hand, when workmates gather after work to drink, what do they talk about? Well, work.

That’s why people say a new advertising campaign or a fresh product idea got scratched onto a napkin. It’s

not a metaphor. Further, the ability to labor together with others—teamwork—that’s a real job

qualification, and it’s reasonable to suppose that people who get along well drinking will carry the

camaraderie over to the next morning’s breakfast meeting (where coffee and tea are served). This explains

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why companies including Deloitte Consulting encourage and even to some extent pressure employees to

socialize outside the office.
[5]

Finally, it’s a hard call—there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. It’s also difficult to be

absolutely certain how the party qualification should be managed if it’s included in the performance

evaluation. On one hand, a strong case can be made for transparency and openness, for simply stating

that after-hours socializing is, in fact, a part of the job. To not inform workers, the argument goes, that

hanging out is a job requirement is really a form of lying: it’s dishonest because the default understanding

typical employees are going to have is that what counts in determining the quality of work is the work,

period. Whether the assigned task got outlined in a cubicle or on a bar stool is irrelevant. Therefore, any

manager who secretly totes up the social aptitude of the workers is not being honest about the way

workers are graded. It’s the equivalent of a college teacher assigning grades partially based on class

participation without listing that in the syllabus.

On the other hand, all teachers know that listing class participation as part of a student’s grade can lead to

brown nosing, and there’s a similar threat in the workplace: if employees are told to party, then at least a

few are going to tag along for drinks even when they really don’t want to go and end up souring the

evening for everyone. If you as a manager believe in honesty above all, then you may accept that cost. On

the other hand, if your vision of corporate responsibility dovetails more closely with profit maximization,

you may be able to build an ethical case around the idea that in the name of evaluating employees as

perfectly as possible some elements of that evaluation may have to remain close to the vest.

Three Considerations for Promotion: Work Performance, Seniority, Projected

Work Performance

When managing a promotion, there are three fundamental considerations; work performance is the most

obvious. The person most deserving to step up to a higher level of responsibility is the one who’s best

managed current responsibilities. This may be measured by accounts won, contributions to a larger

group, or some other work-related factor, but the key is that the measured performance be related with

the job.

The problem comes in determining exactly what that word related means. When read narrowly, it means

that the employee who looks best on paper—the one who’s written the best reports, achieved the highest

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sales, won the most cases—will be the most deserving. When read broadly, however, the range of

considerations can expand dramatically to include contributions having to do with personality, chemistry,

and other characteristics tangential to nine-to-five tasks. This is where questions about going out for

drinks after work start to gain traction and importance. Finally, it’s not clear that after-hours socializing

should be considered part of work performance, but the fact that it can be included shows how broad this

category is.

The second consideration when weighing a promotion is seniority. Seniority is preference for promotion

granted to the person who’s been with the company the longest. A strong or pure seniority system simply

reduces the choice to comparisons of time with the firm: the promotion goes to the longest-serving

employee. There’s a taste of fairness here since no one will be overlooked for a job because of a personal

conflict with the boss, or because he doesn’t smile enough at work, or because her skirt is too short or his

necktie too absurd or whatever. More, there’s an inherent tranquility in the fact that all employees know

exactly where they stand. The connected problem, obviously, is that good work is not directly rewarded.

This explains why the seniority system seems especially suited to production line jobs or any kind of labor

where experience is more important than analytic skills, high-level training, or creativity. If it’s true that

experience is what matters on a job, then a seniority system should produce promotions that more or less

dovetail with expertise and the ability to do a good job.

A weak seniority system considers time with the company as a positive element, but only as one

component in evaluating candidates for a promotion. The advantage of this kind of system is the

encouraging of worker loyalty. The retention of good workers is nearly the highest human resources

priority of any company, and rewarding seniority plus performance gives good workers a reason to stick

around. Equally important, it helps retain good, loyal workers without forcing the company to promote

old-timers who’ve never really learned to get the job done well.

The third promotion consideration is projected performance, which evaluates candidates in terms of what

they’ll be able to do in the future. A tool used by companies to groom young people for future leadership

roles, the escalation normally goes to highly qualified individuals currently working at a level beneath

their ability. For example, a health insurance company may hire a college graduate with a strong premed

profile and hope to keep that person out of medical school by pulling her up the career ladder at a crisp

rate. She simply doesn’t have the experience, however (no one does), to just start near the top. In order

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for her to play a leadership role in the future, she does need to be familiar with how the company works at

every level, including the lowest. That means spending some time on the front lines, say, manning

telephones, answering questions from (frequently frustrated or angry) customers. Of course it’s difficult to

really stand out in this kind of work, so if she’s going to move up, it’s going to have to be because she’s

expected to stand out at something more demanding later on.

Other employees are going to be tempted to resent the rapid ascension since many of them have done just

as well at the same job for a longer time. Within the narrow view of performance evaluation (your job

performance equals how well you do the work) their resentment is justified. The rule of equal treatment is

being severely broken. But if you’re in management, you have a responsibility to the company (and to

shareholders if the company is public) to be successful. And you need to face the problem that highly

educated and qualified young people have options. Arguably, retaining them is a higher priority—not just

financially but also ethically—than keeping more replaceable talent content.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 Work performance is defined in diverse ways, and managers may have a right to consider after-hours

activities as part of that definition.

 Three common criteria for awarding promotions are seniority, work performance, and projected

performance. Each contains specific ethical tensions.

R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why might someone’s social skills be considered a factor in receiving a promotion?

2. What are some advantages and disadvantages of seniority promotion?

3. Why might a promotion be based on projected performance?

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[1] Maya, “Alcohol: Income Booster?,” Monster (blog), September 20, 2006, accessed May 24,

2011, http://monster.typepad.com/monsterblog/2006/09/alcohol_ income_.html.

[2] Bethany L. Peters and Edward Stringham, “No Booze? You May Lose,” Reason Foundation, September 1, 2006,

accessed May 24, 2011,http://reason.org/news/show/127594.html.

[3] Bethany L. Peters and Edward Stringham, “No Booze? You May Lose,” Reason Foundation, September 1, 2006,

accessed May 24, 2011,http://reason.org/news/show/127594.html.

[4] Maya, “Alcohol: Income Booster?,” Monster (blog), September 20, 2006, accessed May 24,

2011, http://monster.typepad.com/monsterblog/2006/09/alcohol_ income_.html.

[5] Deloitte Consulting: WetFeet Insider Guide (San Francisco: WetFeet), accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.wellesley.edu/Activities/homepage/consultingclub/wetfeet%20-%20deloitte_consulting .

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8.4 Firing

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Define legal guidelines on firing employees.

2. Elaborate justifiable reasons for deciding to fire.

3. Set standards for the actual firing process.

4. Consider ways of limiting the need to terminate employees.

Optimal Level Firing

A study funded by the CATO Institute and titled “The Federal Government Should Increase Firing Rate”

concludes this way: “The rate of ‘involuntary separations’ is only about one-fourth as high in the federal

government as in the private sector. No doubt private-sector firing is below optimal as well since firms are

under threat of expensive wrongful discharge lawsuits.”
[1]

There is, in other words, an optimal level for firing, and in both the public and private sectors it’s not

being met. People aren’t being fired enough.

The strictly economic question here is, “What is the optimal firing level?” No matter the answer, there’s an

ethical implication for the workplace: firing workers is a positive skill. For managers to perform well—for

them to serve the interest of their enterprise by maximizing workplace performance—the skills of

discharging employees must be honed and applied just like those of hiring and promoting.

On the ethical front, these are the basic questions:

 When can an employee be fired?

 When should an employee be fired?

 How should an employee be fired once the decision’s been made?

 What steps can management take to support workers in a world where firing is inevitable?

When Can an Employee Be Fired?

In the world of for-profit companies, most work contracts offer at-will employment. Within this scheme, a

clause is written into the contract offering employment only as long as the employer desires. Stated more

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aggressively, managers may discharge an employee whenever they wish and for whatever reason. Here’s a

standard version of the contractual language:

This is an “At Will” employment agreement. Nothing in Employer’s policies, actions, or this

document shall be construed to alter the “At Will” nature of Employee’s status with Employer,

and Employee understands that Employer may terminate his/her employment at any time for

any reason or for no reason, provided it is not terminated in violation of state or federal law.

The legal parameters for firing seem clear.

Things blur, however, once reality hits. As the Cato study authors note, simply the fear of a possible

lawsuit does impinge to some extent on the freedom to fire, especially when the discharged worker fits

into a protected group. This means older workers, foreigners, or disabled workers may protest that no

matter what reasons are given for termination—assuming some are given—the real reason is their age,

nationality, or disability. Further, gender protection may be claimed by women fired from largely male

companies and vice versa.

Another round of blurring occurs on the state level where legislation sometimes adds specific employee

protections, and so curtails employers’ rights. In Minnesota, for example, firing may not be based on a

worker’s participation in union activities or the performance of jury duty.

These varied and frequently changing legal protections are the reason managers are typically instructed to

keep detailed records of employee performance. If those can be produced to show a pattern of

incompetence or simply inadequate results, they can justify a dismissal before a judge, if it ever comes to

that.

Even though legal complexities mean managers are well advised to be careful about firing workers, and

it’s prudent to be sure that there are directly work-related reasons for the dismissal, none of that changes

the fact that at-will hiring gives wide latitude to the company, and fired workers are typically left with few

good avenues of protest. One way to see how tilted the table is toward the employer and away from the

employee is to compare the American at-will firing system with the European model, where a reasonable

cause for termination must be demonstrated. In the United States, employers may more or less fire

anyone for any reason, and the burden of showing the termination was illegal or unfair falls entirely on

the worker. In Europe, by contrast, the legal burden falls largely on the employer. Instead of the worker

having to show the firing was wrong, now the company has to show the firing was right. This is a big deal.

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It’s like the difference between innocent until proven guilty and guilty until proven

innocent. Just because firing means the company holds the burden of proof: it must demonstrate that the

worker wasn’t holding up his or her end of the employment contract. That’s a lot harder to do than just

producing some work evaluations to buttress the claim that she wasn’t fired because she’s Jewish or he

wasn’t let go because he’s Asian. As opposed to the European reality, the conclusion is, employees in the

United States hired at will have little recourse against a company that wants them out.

Finally, it’s worth noting that elements of just cause law have been working their way into the American

legal system in recent years.

When Should an Employee Be Fired?

Because the legal footing is usually more or less solid for American managers, the real hard questions

about terminating employees aren’t legal ones about what can’t be done but ethical ones about what

should be done.

Sometimes firing is unavoidable. Economic slowdowns frequently bring furloughs and terminations.

When the company’s books turn red, and after the entire easy cost cutting has been done, people need to

be cut. Who? There are three broad philosophies:

1. Inverted seniority

2. Workload

3. Recovery preparation

Inverted Seniority occurs when the last worker hired is the first released. This works especially well for

assembly-line-type labor where one worker can replace another easily. As long as replacement is possible,

dismissing the most recently hired allows clear and impersonal rules to make downsizing orderly.

Workload firings focus the pain of job cuts on that part of the company suffering most directly from a

falloff in business. An office furniture supply company may find its line of hospital products unaffected by

an economic downturn (people keep getting sick even if they don’t have a job) so layoffs are taken from

other divisions. This may mean losing workers with higher seniority or better job performance, but it

minimizes cash-flow disruption.

Recovery preparation takes the long view on an economic slowdown: firings and layoffs are executed not

so much to compensate for the present downturn but to sharpen the company for success when the

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economy bounces back. Staying with the office furniture supply company, the owner may see better long-

term opportunities for profits in the nonhospital units, so the downsizing may occur across the board. The

idea is to keep those slow-moving units at least minimally prepared to meet new demand when it

eventually comes.

Sometimes economic slowdowns don’t reflect a problem with the larger economy, they’re the result

of fundamental changes in the market, frequently brought on by technological advance. For example, the

popularization of digital photography has shrunk the market for old fashioned film. Seeing this coming,

what can a company like Kodak do? They’re probably going to let workers from the old film side go to

create room for new hires in the digital division. This is potentially unfair to terminated workers because

they may be doing exemplary work. Still, it would be unfair—and financially disastrous—to the company

as a whole to not change with the times.

Rank and yank is a management philosophy promoted by former General Electric Company CEO Jack

Welch. Every year, he counsels, the entire workforce should be ranked and the bottom 10 percent

(“There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” he says) should be fired to make room for new employees who may be

able to perform at a higher level. Here, the responsibility to the company is being weighed far heavier than

the one to the employee because, theoretically at least, those in the bottom 10 percent may be doing fine

on the job—fulfilling their responsibilities adequately—it’s just that others out there who could be hired to

replace them may do it better. In the hope they will, workers who’ve done nothing wrong are sacrificed.
[2]

There are two main criticisms of this practice. First, it’s a betrayal of employees who are fulfilling their

contractual obligations (they’re just not over performing as well as others). Second, it’s counterproductive

because it lowers morale by drowning workers in the fear that even though they’re doing what’s being

asked, they may end up in that dreaded bottom 10 percent.

Employee misbehavior is the least controversial reason to fire a worker. Here, the ethics are relatively

clear. Employees aren’t being mistreated when they’re dismissed because it’s their own actions that lead

to their end. Standard definitions of misbehavior include

 rudeness toward clients or customers,

 drinking or drugs on the job,

 theft of company property or using company property for personal business,

 frequent and unexplained absences from work,

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 entering false information on records,

 gross insubordination,

 fighting or other physical aggression,

 harassment of others (sexual, sexual orientation, religious, racial, and similar).

How Should an Employee Be Fired Once the Decision’s Been Made?

At the Friday all-staff meeting the office manager stands up to announce, “The good news is the following

people have not been fired!” He reads a list of seventeen names. There are nineteen people at the meeting.

That’s from a (perhaps unemployed) comic’s stand-up routine. Unfortunately, people have written into

the CNNMoney.com with real stories that aren’t so far removed:

 An employee received news of her firing in a curt letter delivered to her home by FedEx.

 A man tells of being halted at the building door by security and being humiliatingly sent away.

 People report that they arrived at their office to find the lock changed and their stuff thrown in a box

sitting on the floor.
[3]

All these are inhumane firings in the sense that no flesh and blood person took the trouble to present the

bad news.

It’s easy to understand why inhumane firings occur: not many people enjoy sitting down with someone

and telling them they’re out. So it’s tempting to yield to cowardice. Instead of facing the worker you’ve

fired, just drop a note, change the lock, and talk to security. On the ethical level, however, firing an

employee is no different from working with an employee: as a manager, you must balance your duties to

the company and the worker.

How can the manager’s duty to the organization be satisfied when terminating a worker? First, to the

extent possible, the fired person should leave with a positive impression of the organization. That means

treating the employee with respect. No mailed notices of termination, no embarrassing lockouts, just a

direct, eye-to-eye explanation are probably the most reliable rule of thumb.

Second, the terminated employee should not be allowed to disrupt the continued work of those who

remain. If deemed necessary, security personnel should be present to ensure the ex-worker leaves the

premises promptly. Also, if the worker is involved in larger projects, a time for severance should be found

when their contribution is minimal so that other members of the team will be able to carry on near

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normally. (It may be recommendable to arrange the termination to coincide with the finishing of a larger

project so that everyone may start fresh with the new, substitute employee.)

Third, the financial costs of the termination should be minimized. This means having clear reasons for the

termination and documents (pertaining to worker performance or behavior) supporting the reasons to

guard against lawsuits. Also, there should be clear understandings and prompt payment of wages for work

done, as well as reimbursements for travel expenses and the full satisfaction of all monetary obligations to

the employee. This will allow the human resources department to close the file.

With duties to the company covered, how can the manager’s duty to the employee be satisfied?

Consultants—both legal and ethical—typically share some bullet-point answers. First, the employee

should be addressed honestly and directly with a clear explanation for termination. Speak firmly, the

advice is; don’t waver or provide any kind of false hope. Further, the termination should not come as a

total surprise. Previous and clear indications should have been given concerning employee performance

along with specific directions as to what areas require improvement. Many companies institute a structure

of written warnings that clearly explain what the employee’s job is and why their work is not meeting

expectations.

Second, getting fired is embarrassing, and steps should be taken to minimize the humiliation. The

employee should be the first to know about the discharge. Also, the severance should occur in a private

meeting, not in view of other workers. To the extent possible, the employee should have an opportunity to

say good-bye to workmates or, if this is the preference, to leave discreetly. For this reason, a meeting late

in the day may be chosen as the appropriate time for notice to be given.

Third, to the extent possible and within the boundaries of the truth, an offer should be extended to

provide a recommendation for another job.

Fourth, make sure the employee gets all the money coming for work done, without having to jump

through hoops.

What Steps Can Management Take to Support Workers in a World Where Firing

Is Inevitable?

One response to the inescapable reality that firing happens is preemptive; it’s to reduce the moral

uncertainty and hardship before they arise. Two strategies serve this purpose: actions can be

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implemented to minimize the occasions when firing will be necessary, and steps can be taken to reduce

the severity of the firing experience for employees when it happens.

In her book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Moss Kanter generates a list of measures that

corporations use to diminish firings, and reduce the professional impact for those who are let go. Here’s

an abbreviated selection of her recommendations, along with a few additions:

 Recruit for the potential to increase competence, not simply for narrow skills to fill today’s slots.

 Rotate assignments: allow workers to expand their competence.

 Retrain employees instead of firing them.

 Offer learning opportunities and seminars in work-related fields.

 Subsidize employee trips to work-related conferences and meetings.

 Provide educational sabbaticals for employees who want to return to school.

 Encourage independence and entrepreneurship: turn every employee into a self-guided professional.

 Keep employees informed of management decisions concerning the direction of the company: What units

are more and less profitable? Which ones will grow? Which may shrink?

 Ensure that pensions and benefits are portable.
[4]

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 At-will firing grants employers broad legal latitude to discharge employees, but it does not erase ethical

concerns.

 Justifiable worker firings include cases where workers bear none, some, or all of the blame for the

discharge.

 The act of firing a worker requires managers to weigh responsibilities to the organization and to the ex-

employee.

 Steps can be taken to limit the need for, and effects of, employee discharge.

R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S

1. What’s the difference between at-will and just cause firing?

2. How might fundamental changes in the marketplace require a company to fire workers?

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3. What is rank and yank?

4. When managers fire employees, what duties do they hold to the organization, and what are the duties to

the dismissed worker?

5. What are some steps organizations can take to protect their workers from the effects of discharge if firing

becomes necessary?

[1] Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven, “Federal Government Should Increase Firing Rate,” Cato Institute, Tax and

Budget, no. 10 (November 2002), accessed May 24, 2011,http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0211-10 .

[2] Allan Murray, “Should I Rank My Employees?,” Wall Street Journal, accessed May 24,

2011, http://guides.wsj.com/management/recruiting-hiring-and-firing/should-i- rank-my-employees.

[3] “Worst Ways to Get Fired,” CNNMoney.com, September 6, 2006, accessed May 24,

2011, http://money.cnn.com/blogs/yourturn/2006/09/worst-ways-to-get-fired.html.

[4] List adapted from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1993),

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8.5 Case Studies

Fashionable

In her blog Love This, MJ (full name not provided) relates that she’s been an aspiring clothes designer

since she started sewing tops for her Barbie dolls. Things weren’t going well, though, as she tries to break

into the industry. One thing she notices is that there aren’t a lot of female fashion designers out there—

Vera Wang, Betsey Johnson, and a few more. Not many. So she starts trying to figure it out with questions

like these:

 Do women want straight guy designers to dress them because they dress to please the men? It could make

sense: what that designer likes, the man in her life is going to love too.

 Do women prefer gay men to dress them because gay men are their new girlfriends? Gay men are usually

more receptive to trends and physical appearances too.

 Do women prefer women designers because she knows a woman’s body better?

 Do men have the same issue? Do some men prefer a lesbian designer? Would they balk at being dressed

by a gay designer?
[1]

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Assume MJ is right when she hypothesizes that most women like straight male designers because straight

guys are the ones they’re trying to impress, so they want clothes straight guys like. Now imagine you’ve

been put in charge of a new line of women’s clothes. Your number one task: sales success. You’ve got five

applicants for the job of designing the line. Of course you could just ask them all about their sexual

Ima
ge re

mov
ed d

ue to
cop

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.

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orientation(s), but that might leave you open to a discrimination lawsuit. So could you devise a test for

new applicants that’s fair—that gives everyone an equal chance—but still meets your requirement of

finding someone who produces clothes that straight guys get excited about?

2. Four standard filters for job applicants are

o education level,

o high-risk lifestyle,

o criminal record,

o flamboyant presence in social media.

Which of these might be used to winnow out applications for a job as a clothes designer? Explain

in ethical terms.

3. MJ wonders whether women might prefer women designers because she knows a woman’s body better. Is

there a bona fide occupational qualification for a women’s fashion company to hire only women

designers? Is there a difference between a BFOQ based on sex and one based on sexual orientation?

4. MJ asks, “Do women prefer gay men to dress them because gay men are their new girlfriends?” Assume

you think there’s something to this. Could you design a few behavioral interview questions that test the

applicants’ ability to become girlfriends (in the sense that MJ means it) with their clients? Would these be

ethically acceptable interviews, or do you believe there’s something wrong and unfair about them?

God at Work

Image
remov

ed due
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issues.

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The University of Charleston is a private, nonreligious institution with a very particular job opening: the

Herchiel and Elizabeth Sims “In God We Trust” Chair in Ethics. According to the job description, the

successful candidate for this job as a professor “must embrace a belief in God and present moral and

ethical values from a God-centered perspective.”
[2]

Q U E S T I O N S

1. You’re in charge of getting applicants for this post and you’ve got a small advertising budget. What ethical

responsibilities should you consider when determining where to place the ad? How broadly should you

advertise the position?

2. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke University, “The description that

‘candidates must embrace a belief in God and present moral and ethical values from a God-

centered perspective,’ violates the Civil Rights Act as religious discrimination in

employment.”
[3]

Imagine you’re in charge of every step of the process of filling this job. How

could you respond in terms of

o bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs),

o testing,

o interviewing?

3. You’re the university president. The person who currently holds the In God We Trust

Professorship has, by all accounts, been doing a mediocre to poor (but not directly unacceptable)

job. One day you happen to trip across the person’s blog page and notice that your professor

claims to be a sadist and practices a mild form of devil worship (also, the prof’s favorite movie

is The Omen). Right now the In God We Trust Professor of ethics is down the hall lecturing to

seventy-five undergrads. You sneak to the door and listen from outside. The professor sounds just

like always: dull and passionless, but the talk is about the Bible, and nothing’s being said that

seems out of line with the job description. Still, you decide to terminate the relationship.

o In a pure at-will working environment, you can just fire the professor. But imagine you want to

demonstrate just cause. How does this change the way you approach the situation? What would

your just causes be?

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o The professor’s classes are passionless because he doesn’t believe in what he’s teaching. Still, his

teachings are not directly wrong. Does this case show why a manager may be ethically required in

certain situations to implement a strategy of rank and yank?

Explain.

Testing Baseball Players’ DNA

The New York Times reports that there’s a “huge difference between sixteen and nineteen years old,”

when you’re talking about prospects for professional baseball. A kid whose skills knock your socks off for a

sixteen-year-old just looks modestly good when he practices with nineteen-year-olds.
[4]

This is a significant problem in the Dominican Republic, which produces excellent baseball players but

little in the way of reliable paperwork proving who people really are and when they were born. The

Cleveland Indians learned all about that when they gave a $575,000 bonus to a seventeen-year-old

Dominican named Jose Ozoria, only to later find out he was actually a twenty-year-old named Wally

Bryan.

This and similar cases of misidentification explain why baseball teams are starting to apply genetic tests to

the prospects they’re scouting. Typically, the player is invited to provide a DNA sample from himself and

his parents to confirm that he’s no older than he claims. The player pays for the test and is reimbursed if

the results show he was telling the truth.

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Q U E S T I O N S

1. Many experts in genetics consider testing an unethical violation of personal privacy.

o What does it mean to “violate personal privacy”?

o Can a utilitarian argument (the greatest good for the greatest number should be sought) in favor

of DNA testing in the Dominican Republic be mounted? What could it look like?

2. In the baseball world, other tests that clearly are allowed as part of the hiring process include testing a

player’s strength and speed. Is there anything in the fair application of these tests that may ethically

allow—even require—that baseball teams extract DNA to confirm the age?

3. Assume you accept that testing a prospect’s age is a bona fide occupational qualification (after all,

the job is to be a prospect: a developing player, not an adult one). Once you accept that, how do

you draw the line? Couldn’t teams be tempted to use DNA facts for other purposes?

The Times article interviews a coach who puts it this way:

I know [the baseball teams taking the DNA samples] are looking into trying to figure out

susceptibility to injuries, things like that. If they come up with a test that shows someone’s

connective tissue is at a high risk of not holding up, can that be used? I don’t know.
[5]

Can you formulate an ethical argument in favor of teams secretly using DNA tests to do just that,

check for as many yellow and red flags as possible in the young prospect’s genetic code?

4. Baseball scouting—the job of hiring excellent future players and screening out mediocre ones—is very

competitive. Those who do it well are paid well; those who don’t are cycled out quickly to make room for

someone else. You have the job, you have the DNA sample. What do you do? Why?

5. You decide to do the test in question four. The problem is people aren’t trees; you can’t age them

just by counting genetic rings—you also need to do some cross-testing with the parents’ DNA. You

do that and run into a surprise: it turns out that the young prospect’s father who’s so proud of his

athletic son isn’t the biological dad. Now what?

o Is there an argument here against DNA testing, period? What is it?

o Remember, the family paid for the test. Do you have a responsibility to give them these results?

Explain.

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6. Lou Gehrig was the first athlete ever to appear on a box of Wheaties. From 1925 to 1939 he played for the

Yankees in every game: 2,130 straight appearances, a record that lasted more than fifty years. He was

voted into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. He died in 1941 from a genetic disorder—yes, Lou Gehrig’s

disease—that today’s DNA tests would identify. Is there an ethical argument here against DNA testing of

prospects or one in favor? Or is the argument about this more theoretical—should the rules be decided

regardless of what has actually happened at some time or place? Explain.

7. In a different sport, the sprinter Caster Semenya won the world eight-hundred-meter challenge in 2009

with a time that few men could equal. She looked, in fact, vaguely like a man, which led the International

Athletics Federation to run a genetic gender test. She is, it turns out, neither a woman nor a man; she’s a

hermaphrodite: a little bit of both. Does the fact that genetic tests don’t always return clean, black-and-

white results make their use less advisable from an ethical perspective? Why or

why not?

Windfall at Goldman

Goldman Sachs is an expansive financial services company. Many clients are institutional: private

companies and government organizations wanting to raise cash seek Goldman’s help in packaging and

then selling stock or bonds. On the other side, private investors—wealthy individuals wanting to multiply

their riches—receive a hearty welcome at Goldman because they have the cash to purchase those stocks

and bonds. Ultimately, Goldman Sachs is a hub where large companies, governmental powers, and

wealthy people come and do business together.

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Executives at Goldman Sachs are among the world’s highest paid. According to a New York Times article,

“At the center of Goldman’s lucrative compensation program is the partnership. Goldman’s partners are

its highest executives and its biggest stars. Yet while Goldman is required to report compensation for its

top officers, it releases very little information about this broader group, remaining tightlipped about even

basic information like who is currently a partner.”
[6]

The rest of the article investigates this shadowy partnership. The conclusions: “Goldman has almost 860

current and former partners. In the last 12 years, they have cashed out more than $20 billion in Goldman

shares and currently hold more than $10 billion in Goldman stock.”

This tally of accumulated wealth in Goldman stock doesn’t even include the standard salary and cash

bonuses the partners receive, but leaving that aside, here’s the math: $30 billion divided by 860 divided

by 12 should give some sense of the wealth each of these corporate stars is accumulating over the course of

a year. To give a provisional idea of how large the number of dollars is here, when you try plugging $30

billion into an iPhone calculator, you find the screen can’t even hold a number that long. Using a different

calculator yields this result: $2.9 million per partner every year.

The 2.9 million can be compared with the salary earned by the average American: $50,000 a year. The

Goldman partner gets that in less than a week. This huge money explains the clawing fight that goes on

inside Goldman to become a partner. The odds are long. Each time the books are opened to admit a new

class, only 1 of 330 Goldman employees makes the cut. It is, in the words of one former partner, “a very

Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest firm.”

In the public comments section of the New York Times story about Goldman, a person identified as GHP

picks up on the firm’s characterization as a “Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest” place. He wrote, “The

French revolution was also very Darwinian, let’s give that a try.” During the French Revolution, the

wealthy and powerful were rewarded with a trip to the guillotine.

Probably, GHP isn’t just annoyed about how much money executives at Goldman make, he, like a lot of

people, is peeved by the fact that the company was bailed out by the federal government during the 2008–

9 financial crisis. Had the taxpayers (people making $50,000) not kicked in, Goldman might’ve gone

bankrupt, and all that money its partners accumulated in stock would’ve vanished. As it happens, the US

government’s bailout was masterminded by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. His previous job was

CEO (and partner) at Goldman.

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Q U E S T I O N S

1. Goldman is dominated by a “Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest” mentality. What does that mean?

o In ethical terms, how can this mentality be justified?

o Would a company dominated by this mentality, whether it’s Goldman or not, be more likely to

announce job openings to a limited public, or as a massive public announcement? Why?

2. Describe the advantages of a “behavioral interview.” If you were in charge of hiring for a company seeking

employees who flourish in a survival-of-the-fittest environment, what kind of question might you ask in a

behavioral interview? Why?

3. One contributor to the New York Times comments section writes, “There are sure to be lots of

pointed, angry posts about how unfair it is that these guys make so much money etc. But if we are

honest, there is a fair amount of envy and pure remorse that we weren’t bright enough to go

down that path! And these guys are very bright.”

How could these comments be construed to explain why high wages and big bonuses are used by

Goldman to motivate its workers? What is it that makes big money (or the possibility of big

money) function as a powerful motivator to encourage employees to work hard and well?

Ethically, how can this use of big money be justified?

4. One difference between offering an employee a wage increase and offering a bonus is that the

latter doesn’t come automatically the next year. The employee has to earn it from scratch all over

again.

o Why might managers at Goldman award their best workers with a bonus instead of a wage

increase?

o By appeal to an ethical theory, could you make the case that, in general, employees should be

paid mainly through a bonus system? How would the theory work at two extremes: wealthy

Goldman executives and waitresses at a corner diner?

5. Given the kind of work that’s done at Goldman—bringing wealthy people and powerful organizations

together to make deals—why might party aptitude (the ability to mix socially after hours) be considered

when deciding who does and who doesn’t make partner at Goldman? How could that decision be justified

ethically? How could it be criticized ethically?

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6. Make the case that in theoretical terms, managers at Goldman have an ethical responsibility to institute

the process of rank and yank.

The Five O’Clock Club

A Washington Post story about firing employees relates that some companies use “the surgical method:

terminations that last about 15 seconds, after which former employees are ushered off company

property.”
[7]

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. For about $2,000 per fired employee, the outplacement company

Five O’Clock Club will help employers manage the actual termination moment more compassionately.

Later on, the fired worker receives a year of career coaching to help get back on track.

What do the Five O’Clock Club recommend managers do at the critical moment when giving the bad

news? To answer, according to the Post, they offer a booklet titled How to Terminate Employees While

Respecting Human Dignity, which “asks managers to approach layoffs with the understanding that,

‘unlike facilities and equipment, humans have an intrinsic worth beyond their contribution to the

organization.’”
[8]

Then some catchphrases are provided for managers to use:

 George, you’ve been a trooper. I’m sorry that this organization has moved in a different direction.

 George, you have made many good friends here. We hope those friendships will continue.

 George, you have made considerable and long-lasting contributions and they are acknowledged and

appreciated.
[9]

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Five O’Clock Club vice president Kim Hall—who downs a lot of Tylenol and coffee on the job—relates

several other phrases that may be helpful:

 I know this is hard, but you’ll get back on your feet.

 The timing could actually work in your favor. A lot of people take vacation in the summer. There’s no

competition for job hunters.

 Maybe this is a chance to begin your dream career. Follow your heart.
[10]

In sum, the Five O’Clock Club helps workers feel better when they’re fired, and helps them get on with

their lives. Meanwhile, employers get a hedge against lawsuits. The outplacement service, according to the

Five O’Clock Club literature, “can redirect anger or anxiety away from the organization and…encourage

the newly-fired to sign their severance agreements so they can get on with their lives.”
[11]

Q U E S T I O N S

1. The Five O’Clock Club charges $2,000 per firing. If you were fired, would you prefer to receive the

compassionate end the Five O’Clock Club provides, or just get shown the door but also get to keep

that $2,000 for yourself?

o If you’re the boss, do you have the right to decide this for the fired employee? Why or why not?

o If you’re the boss, do you have the responsibility to decide this for the fired employee? Why or

why not?

2. According to the Five O’Clock Club, “Unlike facilities and equipment, humans have an intrinsic

worth beyond their contribution to the organization.”

o Does this sound like utilitarian ethical thinking to you, or is it more in line with the notion of an

ethics guided by basic duties and rights? Why?

o Probably, everyone agrees that humans aren’t just machines that can be installed and replaced.

But can an ethical argument be made to treat people in the workplace as machines—that is, to

abruptly hire them when they’re useful and fire them when they’re not? What ethical theory (or

theories) could help you make the case?

3. In general terms, here are three firing situations:

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o an economic downturn (good workers are sacked because the company can’t afford to keep

them)

o rank and yank (workers are fulfilling their duties but not as well as most of the others)

o misbehavior (a worker is fired directly because of something done or not done)

Looking at these three contexts and the Five O’Clock Club, do you think their services should be

hired in all three situations? Do the ethics of firing change depending on why the person is being

fired? Explain.

4. Recall some of the Five O’Clock Club’s pre-packed firing sentences:

o George, you’ve been a trooper. I’m sorry that this organization has moved in a different direction.

o George, you have made many good friends here. We hope….

o George, you…are acknowledged and appreciated.

o Maybe this is a chance to begin your dream career. Follow your heart.

The contrasting method of firing employees—the surgical method—is to look the person in the

eye, say you’re fired, and have security march the ex-employee out the door, all in less than a

minute.

o Is it possible to make the case that the surgical method is actually more compassionate and

respectful?

o Is there a place for compassion in business? From a manager’s perspective, how should

compassion be defined within a business context?

5. Maybe the Five O’Clock Club gets hired because a company really wants to help and support fired

employees. Or maybe the company doesn’t really care about them; all they want is to avoid wrongful

termination lawsuits. Ethically, does it matter why the company contracts the Five O’Clock Club? Explain.

[1] “Sexual Orientation in the Fashion Industry,” Love This! (blog), accessed May 24,

2011,http://lovethis.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/sexual-orientation-in-the-fashion-industry.

[2] Rob Capriccioso, “Divinely Inspired Bias?,” Higher Ed, March 1, 2006, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/01/charleston.

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[3] Rob Capriccioso, “Divinely Inspired Bias?,” Higher Ed, March 1, 2006, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/01/charleston.

[4] Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Schwarz, “Baseball’s Use of DNA Raises Questions,” New York Times, July 21, 2009,

accessed May 24, 2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/sports/baseball/22dna.html?hp.

[5] Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Schwarz, “Baseball’s Use of DNA Raises Questions,” New York Times, July 21, 2009,

accessed May 24, 2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/sports/baseball/22dna.html?hp.

[6] Susanne Craig and Eric Dash, “Study Points to Windfall for Goldman Partners,” New York Times, January 18,

2011, accessed May 24, 2011,http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/study-points-to-windfall-for-goldman-

partners/?hp.

[7] Eli Saslow, “The Art of Letting Employees Go,” Washington Post, August 9, 2009, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2009/08/08/AR2009080802659.html?hpid=topnews.

[8] Eli Saslow, “The Art of Letting Employees Go,” Washington Post, August 9, 2009, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/08/08/AR2009080802659.html?hpid=topnews.

[9] Eli Saslow, “The Art of Letting Employees Go,” Washington Post, August 9, 2009, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/08/08/AR2009080802659.html?hpid=topnews.

[10] Eli Saslow, “The Art of Letting Employees Go,” Washington Post, August 9, 2009, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/08/08/AR2009080802659.html?hpid=topnews.

[11] Eli Saslow, “The Art of Letting Employees Go,” Washington Post, August 9, 2009, accessed May 24,

2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/08/08/AR2009080802659.html?hpid=topnews.

• Structure Bookmarks

Chapter 8: Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers
Chapter 8: Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers
Chapter 8: Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers
Chapter 8: Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing Workers
from The Business Ethics Workshop was adapted by Saylor Academy and is available under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
license without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensor.

Chapter 7: Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You Have as You Get from 9 to 5 from

The Business Ethics Workshop was adapted by Saylor Academy and is available under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license without

attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensor. UMGC has modified this work
and it is available under the original license.

http://www.saylor.org/site/textbooks/The%20Business%20Ethics%20Workshop

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org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

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Chapter 7

Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You
Have as You Get from 9 to 5

Chapter Overview

Chapter 7 “Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You Have as You Get from 9 to 5” examines

some ethical decisions facing employees. It considers the values guiding choices made over the course of a

workday.

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7.1 Taking Advantage of the Advantages: Gifts, Bribes, and

Kickbacks

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Define a conflict of interest.

2. Show how gifts in the business world may create conflicts of interest.

3. Delineate standard practices for dealing with gifts.

4. Consider how receiving gifts connected with work may be managed ethically.

5. Define bribes and kickbacks in relation to gifts.

6. Show how the ethics of bribes and kickbacks can be managed inside the ethics of gifts.

Living the High Life

If you’re young, looking for work, and headed toward a big city (especially New York), then you could do a

lot worse than landing a job as a media buyer for an advertising agency. According to an article in New

York magazine, it’s working out well for twenty-four-year-old Chris Foreman, and it’s working out despite

a salary so measly that he can’t afford his own place, a ticket to a movie, or even to add meat to his

homemade spaghetti.
[1]

This is what makes the job click for Foreman: as a media buyer, he oversees where big companies like

AT&T place their advertisements. And because those ads mean serious money—a full page in a glossy,

top-flight magazine costs about five times what Foreman earns in a year—the magazines line up to throw

the good life at him. Thanks to the generosity of Forbes magazine, for example, Foreman spends the

occasional evening on the company’s vast Highlander yacht; he drinks alcohol almost as old as he is,

munches exquisite hors d’oeuvres, and issues orders to white-suited waiters. While guests arrive and

depart by helicopter, Foreman hobnobs with people the rest of us see only on movie screens. A scan of the

Highlander guest book turns up not just celebrities but serious power too: Margaret Thatcher was a guest

once.

A night on the Highlander is a good one, but it’s far from the only event lighting up Foreman’s glitzy life. A

few of his other recent outings are listed in the article, with some estimated cash values attached: An all-

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expenses-paid ski weekend (worth almost $1,000, in Foreman’s estimation); tickets to see Serena

Williams at the US Open ($75 each); invites to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue party, where he

chatted with Heidi Klum and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos; prime seats for sold-out Bruce Springsteen

concerts ($500 each); dinners at Cité, Sparks, Il Mulino, Maloney & Porcelli, and Monkey Bar, to name a

few of his favorites ($100 a pop).

Foreman observes the irony of his life: “It’s kind of crazy, I had dinner at Nobu on Monday [the kind of

restaurant few can afford, even if they’re able to get a reservation], but I don’t have enough money to buy

socks.”
[2]

The Highlander’s spectacularly wealthy owner is Steve Forbes. If he invites former British Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher aboard for a holiday weekend, you can understand why: she’s not just an interesting

person; she’s living history. Serena Williams would be an interesting guest, too, in her way. The same goes

for Heidi Klum and Ms. Romijn-Stamos, in a different way. What they all have in common, though, is that

you know exactly what they’ve got, and why a guy with a big bank account would treat them to an evening.

But what, exactly, does Mr. Forbes expect to get in return for inviting media buyer Chris Foreman? The

answer: “We media buyers are the gatekeepers—no one at AT&T actually purchases the ads. If at the end

of a buying cycle, your budget has an extra $200,000, you’ll throw it back to the person who treated you

best.”
[3]

The answer, in a word, is money.

What’s Wrong with Gifts and Entertainment?

The fundamental problem with the gifts Foreman received and the free entertainment he enjoyed is that

they create a conflict of interest, a conflict between professional obligations and personal welfare. As a

paid media buyer, it’s Foreman’s job and obligation to buy ads in the magazines that will do his clients the

most good, that’ll deliver the biggest bang for the buck. But against that, as a single twenty-four-year-old

guy in New York City, it’s in his personal interest to purchase ads in Forbes magazine since that probably

gets him invited back to the Highlander with its free drinks, exquisite dinners, and, if he’s lucky, some face

time with women he’s already seen quite a bit of in Sports Illustrated. This is a tough spot, and there are

two broad ways it can play out:

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1. Foreman can do the parties at night, go home, sleep, wake up with a clear head, and buy the best ads for

his client. Let’s say the advertising money he’s spending belongs to AT&T and they’re trying to attract new

clients in the forty-five to fifty-five demographic of heavy cell phone users. He takes that target, checks to

see what magazine those people like to read more than any other, and buys a full pager there. If the

magazine happens to be Forbes, great, if not, then Forbes doesn’t get anything back for its party. In this

case, Foreman knows he’s done right by AT&T and his employer. To the best of his ability, he guided

advertising money to the spot where it’ll do the most good. There remains a potential problem here,

however, which is the appearance of a conflict of interest. Even though Foreman didn’t let the parties

affect his judgment, someone looking at the whole thing from outside might well suspect he did if it

happens that Forbes gets the ad buy. This will be returned to later on in this chapter.

2. The darker possibility is that Forbes isn’t the best media buy, but they get the ad anyway because

Foreman wants to keep boarding the Highlander. In this case, Foreman is serving his own interest but

failing his obligations to his employer and to his client.

In pure ethical terms, the problem with the second possibility, with selling out the client, can be reduced

to an accusation of lying. When Foreman or any employee signs up for a job, shows up for work, and then

accepts a paycheck, they’re promising to be an agent for the organization, which is formally defined in

commercial law as someone acting on behalf of the organization and its interests. In some situations it

can be difficult to define exactly what those interests are, but in Foreman’s it’s not. He does well for his

employer when he gives the clients the best advice possible about spending their advertising dollars.

That’s his promise and he’s not fulfilling it.

Redoubling the argument, in the case of the typical media buyer, there’s probably also an explicit clause in

the employment contract demanding that all media advice be objective and uncorrupted by personal

interest. Even without that formal step, however, the shortest route to an ethical condemnation of buying

ads because a night on the Highlander (or some other gift) has been received is to underline that the act

turns the media purchaser into a liar. It makes him or her dishonest every time they come into work

because they’re not providing the objective and impartial advice they promise.

In discussing conflicts of interests, it’s important to keep in mind that those who find themselves caught

up in one haven’t necessarily been corrupted. Just because Foreman finds himself torn between giving

impartial advice to his client and giving the advice that gets him good parties doesn’t mean his judgment

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is poisoned. That said, it’s extremely difficult to walk away from a conflict of interest unstained: any time

serious gifts or rich entertainment gets injected into a business relationship, suspicious questions about

professionalism are going to seep in too.

Finally, there are two broad ways of dealing with gifts, especially those creating conflicts of interest. They

can be flatly refused, or rules can be formulated for accepting them responsibly.

Refusing Gifts and Entertainment

One way to avoid the gift and conflict of interest problem altogether for Chris Foreman or anyone in a

similar situation is to simply refuse any gifts from business partners. Far more frequently than private

businesses, government organizations take this route. The approach’s advantage, obviously, is that it

wipes out the entire question of wrongdoing. The disadvantage, however, is that it dehumanizes work; it

seems to forbid many simple and perfectly appropriate gestures of human interaction.

Here’s an example of what can happen when efforts to eradicate conflicting interests go to the extreme:

it’s from a New York Times front-pager about the state governor:

Governor David A. Paterson violated state ethics laws when he secured free tickets to the opening

game of the World Series from the Yankees last fall for himself and others, the New York State

Commission on Public Integrity charged on Wednesday.
[4]

So, the governor is in trouble because he got some tickets to watch his home team play in the baseball

championship? That’s going to make Chris Foreman’s head swim. Without getting into the details of the

Paterson case, accepting these tickets doesn’t seem like a huge transgression, especially for someone

whose job pays well and is already packed with gala events of all kinds. It’s not as though, in other

words,

Peterson’s going to be blown away by the generosity or become dependent on it. In the case of Foreman

who could barely afford to eat, it’s reasonable to suspect that he may come to rely on his occasional trip to

the Highlander, but it just doesn’t seem likely that the governor’s judgment and ability to fulfill

professional obligations are going to be distorted by the gift provided by the New York Yankees baseball

club. More, as the state’s elected leader, a case could probably be made that the governor actually had a

professional responsibility to show up and root for the home team (as long as the visitors aren’t the Mets).

As a final note, since the now former governor is legally blind, the value of the gift seems limited since he

couldn’t actually see the game he attended.

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Despite this case’s apparent frivolity, the general practice of eliminating conflict of interest concerns by

simply banning gifts can be justified. It can be because so many gifts, just by existing, create the

appearance of a conflict of interest. An appearance of conflict exists when a reasonable person looking at

the situation from outside (and without personal knowledge of anyone involved) will conclude from the

circumstances that the employee’s ability to perform his or her duties may be compromised by personal

interest. This is different from an actual conflict because when there’s really conflict, the

individual feels torn between professional obligations and personal welfare. Almost certainly, Foreman

was tempted to help out Forbes because he really liked the parties. But the case of Governor Paterson

presents only the appearance of a conflict of interest because we don’t know whether he even wanted the

tickets to the Yankees game. Given the fact that he’s blind, he may well have preferred staying home that

night. Still, for those of us who can’t know his true feelings, it does seem as though there might,

potentially, be some incentive for Paterson to return the Yankee favor and provide them some special

advantage. It’s almost certain that at some time in the future, the baseball club will have an issue up for

debate by the state government (perhaps involving the construction of a stadium or maybe just a license

to sell beer inside the one they currently have), and as soon as that happens, the appearance of conflict is

there because maybe Paterson’s response will be colored by the tickets he got.

Conclusion. Refusing to accept any gifts from business associates is a reasonable way of dealing with the

ethical dilemma of conflicting interests. By cutting the problem off at the roots—by eliminating not only

conflicts but the appearance of them—we can go forward with confidence that a worker’s promise to

represent the organization faithfully is uncorrupted by the strategic generosity of others.

What Other Remedies Are Available for Conflict of Interest Problems Stemming

from Gifts?

Categorically refusing gifts may be recommendable in some cases, but in most economic situations a total

ban isn’t realistic. People make business arrangements the same way they make friendships and romance

and most other social things—that mean invitations to the Highlander if you’re lucky, or just to a few

Budweiser’s in the hotel bar. And if you turn everyone down every time, it’s probably going to dampen

your professional relationships; you may even lose the chance to get things done because someone else

will win the contract between drinks.

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So where does the line get drawn for accepting gifts with ethical justification? Whether you happen to be a

renowned politician in a large state or someone just out of school trying to make a go of it in the world,

there are a number of midpoints between Governor Paterson’s obligation to refuse tickets to a game he

couldn’t see anyway and Chris Foreman’s raucous partying on the Highlander. Three of the most common

midpoints are

1. transparency,

2. recusal,

3. organizational codes.

Transparency, as the word indicates, manages the acceptance of gifts by publicly recognizing their

existence. The idea is that if Foreman is willing to openly acknowledge exactly what he’s getting

from Forbes magazine, then we can trust that there’s nothing underhanded going on, no secret

agreements or deals. Of course the gifts may still influence his judgment, but the fact that they’re public

knowledge at least removes the sense that he’s trying to get away with something.

Recusal is abstaining from taking part in decisions contaminated by the appearance of a conflict of

interest. Foreman could, for example, keep going to Highlander parties but not manage any media buying

for the demographic that reads Forbes. It’s fairly easy to imagine a team of media buyers working together

on this. Every time something comes up that might be right for Forbes, Foreman passes the decision on to

Sam Smith or whoever and so removes himself from the conflict.

In the public sphere, especially politics and law, it’s common for judges and legislators to remove

themselves from considering issues bearing directly on their welfare. A judge who owns stock in the

Omnicom communications group may recuse herself from hearing a civil case brought against the

company. Legislators deciding what the salary should be for legislators may ask for recommendations

from an independent panel.

Organizational codes are one of the theoretically easiest but also one of the more practically difficult

ways to handle gifts. The advantage of a code is that it can provide direct responses for employees trying

to decide whether they can accept a gift. In Oregon, for example, legislators are prohibited from accepting

gifts valued at more than fifty dollars. Assuming the code is reasonable—and in this case it was judged so

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by the state’s supreme court—legislators may assert that by implication accepting a gift valued under that

amount is, in fact, ethical.
[5]

However, the problem with codes is that, like laws, they frequently leave gray areas. That’s especially true

in a media buyer’s world where so much is spent on entertaining. In that kind of reality, it’s very difficult

to put a specific price on everything. A night on the Highlander, obviously, is worth a lot to Foreman, but

how does it appear in the accounting books of dollars and cents? Because it’s hard to know, monetary

limits provide only vague ethical guidance for those in Foreman’s line of work.

The broader lesson is that gifts come in so many forms—and with values that can be so difficult to

accurately measure—that it’s virtually impossible to write something encompassing all the specific

possibilities. Many codes of conduct, therefore, end up sounding noble but are really just saying, “Figure it

out for yourself.” Take a look at the last lines from the Code of Conduct from Omnicom, a massive group

of companies including many leading advertising firms that purchase ads in Forbes:

We expect each employee to exercise good judgment and discretion in giving or accepting any

gift. No set of specific rules can anticipate or capture every possible instance in which an ethical

issue may arise. Instead, all of us must be guided by the overarching principle that we are

committed to fair and honest conduct and use our judgment and common sense whenever

confronted with an ethical issue.
[6]

Questions to Ask before Accepting a Gift

In their book Moral Issues in Business, authors William Shaw and Vincent Barry formulate a list of

questions that, when answered, can provide support and clarity for making decisions about whether a gift

may be accepted. They’re not going to tell you what to do—there’s no magic guide—but they can help you

see things more clearly. In modified form and with some additions and subtractions, here’s the list.
[7]

 Is there a conflict of interest, or the appearance of a conflict, that arises because of the

gift? Not every gift raises conflict of interest concerns. Maybe a marketer at Forbes gets a late

cancellation for a Highlander night and can’t find any targeted media buyer to fill the spot, so the invite

gets handed off to a buyer specializing in purchasing ads for young teenagers. Why not? It’d just go to

waste otherwise. And should that lucky media buyer say yes? It’s difficult to find an ethical reason not to

since no conflict of interest concerns seem to arise.

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 What’s the gift’s value? This can be an easy one. When Foreman was invited to a Springsteen concert

he could just look at the tickets and see that he’d been offered something worth $500. On the other hand,

getting the chance to chat up a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model on the Highlander is going to be harder

to quantify. In those cases where a value can be set, the number allows a clean dividing line: anything

above the a specified amount gets categorized as potentially influencing a decision and so causing a

conflict of interest, while any gift worth less may be considered nominal, too small to threaten

professionalism. What’s the magic number? That depends on who’s involved and the general context, but

many organizations are currently setting it at $25, which is, not incidentally, the limit the IRS sets for

business deductions for gifts to any single person during one year.

 Is the gift provided out of generosity or for a purpose? No one can peer into the soul of another,

but something offered during the holiday season may be more acceptable than the same thing offered just

before a major advertising buy is being made.

 What’s the gift’s purpose? Just because a gift isn’t an outpouring of generosity so much as an

expression of self-interest doesn’t mean there’s a corrupting intent. For example, if Forbes magazine

sends Foreman a free copy of each issue, that’s more like advertising for themselves than an attempt to

buy the guy off. Almost all of us have had the same experience: we’ve received calendars or notepads in

the mail from a local real estate agent or insurance seller. These aren’t attempts to buy us, just ways to

present their services. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how tickets to a Springsteen concert given by a

magazine can be anything but an attempt to induce the receiver to give a gift back by throwing some ad

money the publication’s way.

 Is it a gift or entertainment? Traditionally, a distinction has been drawn between giving gifts and

paying for entertainment. As a rule of thumb, the former is something you can take home and the latter is

enjoyed on the spot. Presumably, entertainment raises fewer ethical concerns because it isn’t a payoff so

much as a courtesy extended to a media buyer in exchange for hearing a pitch. If someone

from Forbes wants to convince Foreman that her magazine is the best place for advertising dollars, then it

doesn’t seem so bad, buying him a lunch or a few beers while he hears (endures) the pitch. After all, it’s

her job to sell the magazine and it’s his to know the advantages all the magazines offer. This is just normal

business. Gifts, on the other hand, seem much more like bribes because they don’t exist in the context of

normal business conversations. Take the tickets to a Springsteen concert; they have nothing to do with

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business and can’t be justified as a courtesy extended within the boundaries of normal exchanges between

magazines and ad buyers. Finally, with respect to the parties on the Highlander, those are technically

entertainment since Foreman can’t take the yacht home afterward. It doesn’t sound, though, like a lot of

business talk was going on.

 What are the circumstances? There’s a difference between Forbes magazine handing concert tickets

to media buyers to mark the launching of a new column in the magazine and their constant, ongoing

provisioning. As part of the launch campaign, it’s much easier for Foreman to accept the gift without

feeling trapped by an obligation to throw business Forbes’ way since he can respond to the gesture simply

by being aware that the new column is there and taking it into account when he makes future buying

decisions.

 What power do I have to bestow favors in return for gifts? Foreman’s job title is assistant media

buyer, meaning he probably doesn’t actually decide which magazine gets the business. He just gathers

research data and makes a recommendation to the boss. Does this free him to enjoy the Highlander

night’s guilt free? Hard to be sure, but it definitely helps him fulfill his professional obligations: it’s just

much easier to do the data mining and recommendation writing in the back office than it is to be the guy

sitting out front telling Forbes magazine the answer’s “no,” even though the parties were great. If that’s

the way things go, Foreman may be a coward for letting his boss deliver the bad news to Forbes, but that’s

a personal ethical failure, not a business one.

 What’s the industry accepted practice? In New York state government, as the Paterson case shows,

the accepted practice is no gifts, period. In the looser world of Manhattan media business, New York

magazine sums things up: “Everybody in our industry is guilty of it. Many of those who travel for work

take their boyfriends and call it a vacation.”
[8]

Care should be taken here to avoid the conclusion that

whatever everyone else is doing is OK. That’s not it at all. But it is true that if everyone’s guilty—if all the

magazines are lavishing gifts on media buyers, and all the buyers are accepting—it’s going to be much

easier for Foreman to satisfy his professional obligations. It’s going to be easier for him to tell Forbes “no”

(assuming the demographic facts recommend that) when all the magazines are gifting about equally and

everyone’s accepting than it would be if Forbes were the only magazine giving the gifts and he was the

only one accepting.

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 What’s the organization’s policy? As the Omnicom Code of Conduct illustrates, sometimes policy

provides words but no guidance. As the New York government policy (which prohibits all gifts) shows,

however, sometimes there is guidance. When true guidance is provided, an employee may fairly reason

that following it is fulfilling professional obligations to the employer.

 What’s the law? Generally, laws on gift giving and receiving apply to public officials and those working

with them (politicians, judges, lawyers, businesses doing work for the government). As is always the case,

the legal right doesn’t in itself make ethical right. It can, however, provide the foundation for making an

ethically recommendable decision, assuming other factors—many of which will come up through the set of

questions just listed—have not been ignored.

Conclusion. Gifts cause a conflict of interest when they threaten to corrupt an employee’s judgment on

business matters related to the interests of the person or organization providing the gift. Sometimes gifts

are given with that intention, sometimes not. Regardless, and no matter what the law or corporate

philosophy may be, it’s frequently the employee who ends up deciding whether a gift will be accepted. If it

is, a responsibility follows to justify accepting it.

What’s the Difference among Gifts, Bribes, and Kickbacks?

One advantage of the developed framework for thinking ethically about gifts in the midst of advertising

business relationships is that it provides a compact way to manage the ethics of bribes and kickbacks.

Bribes are gifts—everything from straight cash to entertainment—given to media buyers with the direct

purpose of corrupting their professional judgment by appealing to their personal welfare. When a

representative from Forbes magazine gives Chris Forman tickets to the Springsteen show with the

intention of spurring Foreman to consider buying ad space in Forbes, that’s a gift; it’s left to Foreman to

decide whether he can accept it without betraying his obligation to serve his employer’s interests. When,

on the other hand, the rep gives the same tickets with the intention of getting Forman to directly buy the

space, that’s a bribe. A bribe, in other words, is an extreme conflict of interests where the individual’s

personal interest completely overwhelms the professional responsibilities implied by his job. If Foreman

accepts this kind of gift—one where he knows the intention and accepts that the objectivity of his

judgment will be blinded—then he’s crossed into the zone of bribery. Receiving bribes, finally, seems

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unethical for the same reason that accepting gifts can be unethical: it’s betraying the promise to act as an

agent for the organization.

Kickbacks resemble bribes except that instead of the gift or entertainment being given over first and then

the ad space getting purchased, the ad space is purchased and then a portion of that revenue is sent back

to the media buyer as cash or Springsteen tickets or whatever. Regardless of whether the media buyer gets

his reward first and then buys the ad space, or buys the space and then gets rewarded, what’s happening

on the ethical level doesn’t change. Personal interest is being exploited to corrupt professional judgment.

That means accepting the reward becomes a form of lying since it’s a betrayal of the implicit promise

made to do the job right when you sign the contract.

In the Real World, What’s the Difference among Gifts, Bribes, and Kickbacks?

In actual day-to-day business it can be extremely difficult to distinguish among gifts, bribes, and

kickbacks because at bottom all of them spark conflicts of interest. All of them, consequently, are also

going to incite at least remote suspicions of corruption. Of course it’s always easy to find examples at one

extreme or the other. On the safe side, if a woman seeking your business pays for one cup of coffee for you

once, it’s unlikely that you’ll give her proposal any special consideration, and it’s doubtful that she’d

expect it. If she offers to make your car payments on the other hand, it’s pretty clear something’s going on.

Usually, however, the lines are blurry and the reality more like the one Foreman lived through. The exact

monetary value of what he received wasn’t certain. Did he get the invitations with the intention of having

his judgment tainted or were they extended as a courtesy and in accordance with the industry’s common

practice? Would he get more and better invitations if he sent Forbes magazine some extra dollars? While

these questions don’t have certain answers, the ethics can be rendered in straightforward form. Agents of

an organization have a duty to act in favor of the organization’s interests regardless of what happens after

hours.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 Conflicts of interest arise when an individual’s professional judgment is challenged by an appeal to

personal interest, as occurs when a prospective client offers a gift.

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 Because suspicions of unethical practices arise almost immediately when a conflict of interest exists, even

appearances of a conflict of interest present problems in business.

 Standard practices for dealing with gifts include outright refusal, acceptance of gifts with only nominal

value, acceptance in accord with industry practices, and good sense within a clearly understood situation.

 In certain contexts, gifts of significant value may be accepted ethically, as long as they don’t corrupt

professional judgment.

 Bribes and kickbacks can be managed ethically within the framework constructed for gifts. Both bribes and

kickbacks function as gifts that do, in fact, corrupt an employee’s professional judgment.

R E V I E W

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why do gifts create conflicts of interest?

2. What is the main advantage and disadvantage of dealing with gifts and conflicts of interest by prohibiting

the acceptance of gifts?

3. What questions could you ask yourself to help frame the question as to whether you can ethically accept a

business-related gift?

4. What’s the difference between a conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict?

5. What’s the difference between a gift and a bribe?

6. What’s the difference between a bribe and a kickback?

[1] Sarah Bernard, “Let Them Eat Crab Cakes,” New York, accessed May 19,

2011,http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/2472.

[2] Sarah Bernard, “Let Them Eat Crab Cakes,” New York, accessed May 19,

2011,http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/2472.

[3] Sarah Bernard, “Let Them Eat Crab Cakes,” New York, accessed May 19,

2011,http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/2472.

[4] Nicholas Confessor and Jeremy “Paterson’s Ethics Breach Is Turned Over to Prosecutors,” New York Times,

March 3, 2010, accessed May 19, 2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/nyregion/04paterson.html?hp?hp.

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[5] Bill Graves, “Oregon Supreme Court Upholds $50 Gift Limit for Legislators, Public Officials,” OregonLive.com,

December 31, 2009, accessed May 19,

2011,http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/12/oregon_supreme_court_upholds_5.html.

[6] “Code of Conduct,” Omnicom Group, last updated October 16, 2008, accessed May 19,

2011, http://www.omnicomgroup.com/corporategovernance/codeofconduct.

[7] William Shaw and Vincent Barry, Moral Issues in Business (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), 398–99.

[8] Sarah Bernard, “Let Them Eat Crab Cakes,” New York, accessed May 19,

2011,http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/2472.

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7.2 Third-Party Obligations: Tattling, Reporting, and Whistle-

Blowing

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Define third-party obligations.

2. Elaborate three standard responses to third-party obligations.

3. Define whistle-blowing.

4. Consider justifications and requirements for whistle-blowing.

Caught in the Crossfire

A hypothetical situation. You work at Omnicom, at the desk next to Chris Foreman. Like him, you’re an

assistant media buyer. Though your area of concentration is distinct (you’re in charge of placing ads on

radio stations) you team up with him from time to time to run numbers, and you know enough about how

it all works to recognize when something’s going wrong. In your opinion, it is. Chris is sending ads

to Forbes that would deliver more for the client if they’d been placed in Business Week. Further, you

believe he’s doing it in exchange for the gifts. You can’t prove that but you do know this: he’s occasionally

supplementing his lousy income by selling some of what he’s receiving—concert tickets, vouchers for limo

service, things like that—on eBay. You’ve tried talking about it, bringing the subject up one way or

another, but he doesn’t want to talk back. And when you say it directly, when you ask whether it’s right to

accept gifts from Forbes and convert them to money, he laughs. “Everyone does it,” he says.

This situation is different from most of those discussed so far for an important reason: you’re not directly

faced with an ethical dilemma; you’re not the one placing the ads or accepting the gifts. Still, you do work

with Chris, sometimes even sending over marketing data that he uses for his accounts. You’re a

third party, which in this situation means you’re not directly responsible for what’s going on but you’re

caught in the cross fire between Foreman and Forbes magazine.

There are infinite variations on this kind of predicament. The financier-fraudster Bernie Madoff asked his

secretary to cover up his affairs by answering his wife’s phone calls and saying he was in a meeting and

couldn’t be interrupted. In the student union of your campus, maybe the breakfast menu offers omelets

cooked with fresh eggs, but you work there and know the manager occasionally messes up the stocking

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order and so ends up selling omelets made from a preordered mix of egg-like chemicals. What do you do?

It can be a hard call and at least two questions arise on the way to making it:

1. You need to decide if something truly unacceptable is happening.

2. You’ve got to determine whether it’s any of your business.

If, finally, something unacceptable is happening and you should do something about it, you’re facing

a third-party obligation. This is an ethical responsibility to correct something you’re not actually doing.

Why Should I Get Involved? Ethics and Self-Interest

When confronted with a third-party obligation, employees may get involved for a number of reasons. One

is as a response to an ethical responsibility. Another: as an opportunity to benefit themselves.

Tattling, as any child knows, is revealing an ethical transgression involving others, and revealing it for

your own benefit. Take the case of assistant media buyer Chris Foreman and another assistant media

buyer who learns that Foreman is shortchanging the ad agency’s client for personal benefit. If you’re that

other assistant media buyer and you’re crafty, you may see not only an ethical lapse here but also your

own personal chance. Every senior media buyer has several assistants underneath, and when the time

comes for promotion, there’ll be space, presumably, for only one assistant to advance. Getting Foreman

out of the way may not be a bad career move.

It’s an extremely ambiguous ethical move, however. On one hand, there’s solid justification for getting the

truth known about Foreman. He’s clearly not fulfilling his professional obligations to the company.

However, if you turn him in because that’ll give you a leg up on the promotion ladder, you can hardly say

that ethical righteousness has driven your action. On the other side, this should also be noted: the fact

that you may benefit from revealing unethical behavior probably can’t justify keeping everyone in the

dark.

Typically, we think of ethical restrictions as painful, as obstacles you put between yourself and what you

really want. That’s not always the case, though; they don’t necessarily make you suffer, they may make

others suffer and serve your interests. When they do, you have weaponries ethics—that is, perfectly

reasonable moral dictates used to attack others and benefit yourself. Tattling, finally, is the use of

weaponries ethics; it’s doing the right thing for selfish reasons.

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Responding to a Third-Party Obligation: Reporting

Regardless of the motivation for responding to a third-party obligation, there are two broad paths the

response can take: reporting and whistle-blowing.

Reporting ethical transgressions means bringing them to light, but only within the organization. In most

situations, this route is the most direct way for third parties to balance their basic and immediate

obligations. Staying with the advertising scenario where you believe Foreman is essentially accepting

bribes from Forbes, you have an obligation not only to halt the bribery but also to protect the agency’s

interests. Obviously, a noisy public blowup about Foreman misspending a client’s money is going to

damage the advertising company’s business. Reporting—because it stays inside agency walls—promises to

rectify the bribery without causing larger publicity problems.

Bringing this into the real world, because reporting ethical problems does allow them to be addressed

without harming the agency, the Omnicom Code of Conduct includes this:

All reports of possible violations about which management becomes aware will be promptly

considered. We will not punish any employee or representative for making any report in good

faith.
[1]

It’s in Omnicom’s interest to get ethical dirty laundry washed in-house.

Up to here, the situation’s resolution has come easily. But there’s another, potentially complicating,

obligation to consider: the human link to Chris Foreman. Almost all organizations rely on and seek to

nurture bonds of shared responsibility and dependence between employees: in working life, when

someone’s sick or just having a bad day, the others have to pick up the slack. That nurturing explains why

anyone who’s entered a fast-food restaurant knows the workers aren’t “coworkers” but “teammates.” In

most organizations, some form of the camaraderie holds, and you can’t just break those bonds from one

moment to the next. That means if you’re working with Foreman and you know he’s doing wrong, you

may well feel an obligation to not report anything because you don’t want to cause him problems.

Reporting, the conclusion is, a coworker for ethical lapses is easy. But in the real world there are no

coworkers; there are only flesh and blood people.

Next, even if those human connections to others don’t move you, you also have obligations to yourself and

your own welfare to consider, and turning others in to company authorities can ultimately come back

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against you. By giving rise to distrust and possibly resentment among other colleagues who fear they may

be the next ones to get reported, you may be in essence isolating yourself in your own cubicle.

In the end, seeing what Foreman is doing and stretching ethical obligations through the situation, you

may find yourself torn between reporting him and not. There’s no automatic resolution to this dilemma,

only the attempt to weigh the obligations and get a sense of which outweigh the others.

Responding to a Third-Party Obligation: Whistle-Blowing

Whistle-blowing is bringing ethical transgressions to light publicly outside the organization. A recent case

involved one of the many advertising agencies gathered under the Omnicom umbrella, Leo Burnett. Two

employees—Vice President Greg Hamilton and Comptroller Michelle Casey—alleged, and a subsequent

federal investigation backed them up, that Leo Burnett was overbilling the government for their work on

the US Army’s “Army of One” recruiting campaign.

The agency was supposed to calculate its hourly rate with a formula dividing charges between the more

expensive work done directly in Leo Burnett’s offices and the less costly hourly labor performed by

subcontractors. What Leo Burnett did was simple: they billed subcontractor work at the higher in-house

rate. The accounting in these massive campaigns—TV, radio, and prints ads as well as sponsorships and

events—is so knotted that a virtual army of accountants is required to keep track of where all the money is

going. In that kind of numerical chaos, the agency could expect that switching a few hours from one

column to another deep inside the mountain of paperwork would go unnoticed by outside auditors. It did

go unnoticed—until Hamilton and Casey told the government what was going on.

Almost inevitably a lot of dust gets kicked up when employees turn on their employers noisily and

publicly. In this case, the US Justice Department lawyers rode in, and they probably wanted a scalp on

their wall: they have limited resources, limited time and money, and when they take something on they

want to win, and they want people to know about it. Back on the agency’s side, they’re going to defend

themselves, and that typically entails attacking their accusers, maybe labeling them disgruntled,

incompetent, or worse. In this case, there was also a tug-of-war over money. The agency obviously wanted

to keep as much as it could, the government wanted money back, and thanks to the False Claims Act,

Hamilton and Casey also demanded their share, which came to almost $3 million.

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The False Claims Act is a federal law designed to encourage whistle-blowing on private contractors who

are attempting to defraud the government. Whistle-blowers are entitled, under the law, to 30 percent of

the damages the government obtains. The incentive doesn’t apply to situations involving only private

companies, but even there whistle-blowers may encounter suspicions that ulterior motives—not a

dedication to doing the right thing—finally spurred their loud assertions about misdeeds.

Finally, with respect to the Leo Burnett fraud, the full details will never be known. Because the case never

went to trial, there was little public exhibition of evidence and testimony. To head the whole mess off, Leo

Burnett agreed to settle. In the words of a published report, “Leo Burnett denied any wrongdoing and said

in a statement that it agreed to the settlement ‘to avoid the distraction, burden and expense of

litigation.’”
[2]

Every case of whistle-blowing is different, but a few questions get to the heart of most instances:

 What, exactly, is whistle-blowing?

 What justifies whistle-blowing?

 What weighs against whistle-blowing?

 Can the whistle-blower expect protection?

 Is whistle-blowing morally required?

What Is Whistle-Blowing?

Whistle-blowing is bringing an organization’s ethical transgressions to public light. Spilling the beans to

the family over dinner, however, doesn’t count; the truth must be exposed to an authority or institution

capable of taking action. In the case of the advertising agency, Hamilton and Casey took their information

to the federal government. They also could have selected one of the important industry publications—

say, Advertising Age magazine. Any information published there would draw attention from those

involved and give the client (in this case the US Army) the opportunity to act on behalf of its own

interests. The news media—a newspaper, a TV station—may have been a possibility in this case, given the

large scope of the fraud and the national interest underneath it. Other possibilities could be listed, but

what’s important is that the report of misdeeds goes to someone who can do something about it (or at

least provoke others to do something). Finally, whistle-blowing may be anonymous. However, in practical

terms, that’s frequently not a real option because government authorities, like private ones (editors of

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industry publications and so on), are far less likely to spend time tracking down the truth about

accusations when even the accuser is unwilling to stand behind them.

What Justifies Whistle-Blowing?

Whistle-blowing needs careful justification because it requires violating the obligation any employee has

to protect the interests of the employer. Here are five items that could be checked before publicly lighting

up an organization’s misdeeds from the inside. Importantly, the fact that the items may all be

checked doesn’t oblige action, but it does raise the possibility as ethically justifiable.

1. There is clear evidence of continuing wrongdoing by the organization or continuing effects of past

wrongdoing. In the business world, actions that are entirely locked in the past are the subject of history,

not ethics.

2. The wrongdoing must be serious. In the case of Leo Burnett, the case wouldn’t cross this threshold if only

one hour of labor had been attributed to the higher-cost office. But the threshold would be crossed if the

agency significantly overcharged many hours for years, bleeding the account of its resources and

ultimately damaging the army’s ability to recruit new, top-flight soldiers.

3. The organization’s established, internal channels for reporting and correcting problems have been

exhausted. Most organizations provide clear ways for employees to voice concerns internally. A

conversation with a supervisor is an obvious example. At larger organizations, sometimes an entire

internal department has been mounted to receive and act on the concerns of employees. Here’s the web

page of a typical example; it links to Wal-Mart’s internal department for

ethics:http://ethics.walmartstores.com/Statementofethics/RaiseAConcern.aspx. Whether, finally, there’s

a clear, formal route for internal reporting or not, employees have a responsibility to try to resolve

problems in ways that benefit—or do the least possible damage to—the organization, and therefore the

possibility of raising concerns internally needs to be explored fully. (As always, there are special cases. If,

for example, the CEO of a small advertising company is robbing its client’s money, there may be no

internal route to resolution, leaving external whistle-blowing as the only moral corrective. Also, though

whistle-blowing is defined as taking action outside the organization, the definition could be stretched to

include the act of bringing wrongdoing to light directly before high officials within an organization by

skipping over the normal chain of authority.)

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4. There’s unmistakable and convincing evidence of misconduct. The evidence must be unmistakable in the

sense that it clearly indicates wrongdoing; it can’t be that an innocent explanation seems as likely as a

guilty one. In the Leo Burnett accounting books, if it turns out that on one page all the internal hours are

in the external hour’s column and vice versa, that may be an attempt to defraud the government, or it may

just be that the data-entry guy came to work one morning hung over and ended up confusing the

numbers. Further, the evidence must also be compelling in the sense that there’s enough of it for a

reasonable person to conclude the misdeeds are actually occurring. So even if you’re certain numbers are

being entered incorrectly intentionally, but it turns out that the difference—the amount of extra money

Leo Burnett is making—is trivial, then it’s going to be hard to justify creating a stink. It may be, for

example, that someone in the accounting department is making small adjustments in order to balance

errors found elsewhere in the giant balance sheet.

5. There’s reason to believe that whistle-blowing will resolve the problem. In the case of Leo Burnett—or

any business that’s overcharging a client—you can be pretty sure that bringing the fraud to light will spark

action, at least by the defrauded client. On the other hand, if you’re in the production department of the

advertising agency (in other words, you’re actually filming commercials) and you regularly get shipped

down to Mexico to shoot campaigns because everything’s cheaper down there and you learn that some of

the extras in the commercial’s background are working longer hours than local regulations allow, you

might reasonably figure that you can talk all you want in public, but it’s not going to make any difference.

What Weighs against Whistle-Blowing?

The three heaviest arguments against whistle-blowing are

1. legal requirements for confidentiality,

2. prudential concern for one’s career and personal welfare,

3. an employee’s sense of loyalty to the organization.

A legal requirement for confidentiality may weigh against whistle-blowing by binding employees to not

share a company’s internal information. The requirement traces back to a section contained in many work

contracts. Called a confidentiality clause, here’s a basic version:

Employees may have access to records and other information about customers and other

employees, including proprietary information, trade secrets, and intellectual property to which

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the Company holds rights. Employee agrees to keep all such information strictly confidential and

to refrain from discussing this information with anyone else without proper authority.

While this is most directly aimed at protecting consumer information (say, credit card numbers) and

company trade secrets (Coke’s secret formula), it may also be read as safeguarding the kind of information

a whistle-blower wants to make public. In the case of the Leo Burnett agency, what Vice President

Hamilton and Comptroller Casey told the government did, in fact, involve “records and other information

about customers.”

The second major argument against whistle-blowing, self-interest operates in both the professional and

personal sense. Turning against the company may be the right thing to do, but it’s almost inevitably a

painful thing to do, at least according to a survey published in the New York Times. What condition, the

study sought to determine, do whistle-blowers find themselves in a few years afterward?

 One hundred percent who worked for private business were fired.

 Twenty percent could still not find work at the time this survey was taken.

 Seventeen percent lost their homes.

 Fifty-four percent had been harassed by peers at work.

 Fifteen percent viewed their subsequent divorce as a result of whistle-blowing.

 Eighty percent suffered physical deterioration.

 Eighty-six percent reported significant emotional stress (depression, anxiety).

 Ten percent reported having attempted suicide.
[3]

It doesn’t sound good. Of course every case is different, and if you look on the other side of these numbers,

they leave room for the possibility that at least some people do the right thing and get on with their lives

just fine. Still, there are no guarantees and ethics isn’t only about duties to others and the world outside,

all of us have equal duties to ourselves: duties to maximize our potential, protect those nearest to us, and

defend our own welfare.

Finally, the values and reasons supporting loyalty as a reason for not blowing the whistle will be

considered in their own section further on.

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Protecting the Whistle-Blower

As the survey data about whistle-blowers reveal, there’s not a lot of protection for them. That isn’t for a

lack of trying, however. At both the state and federal levels, reams of laws have been enacted to protect

those who expose wrongdoing organizations. Perhaps the most notable is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Passed

in 2002 by the federal government as a response to a series of disastrous accounting frauds at large

companies, Sarbanes-Oxley is a massive piece of legislation intervening in many parts of the business

world, and especially in aspects connecting to an organization’s finances and transparency.

Specifically with respect to whistle-blowers, the law attempts to encourage it by protecting whistle-

blowers at publicly traded companies that report activities to government agencies. (The act doesn’t apply

to privately held firms dealing exclusively with other private firms.) Employers are prohibited from taking

retaliatory action (firing, demoting, harassing), and whistle-blowers are provided clear avenues for

lawsuits should such retaliation occur. Here’s the legislative language: “In order to establish a case under

Sarbanes-Oxley, an employee must prove that she (1) reasonably believed that her employer was breaking

the law; (2) engaged in whistle blowing activity as defined by the statute; (3) suffered an adverse

employment action; and (4) that there was a causal connection between the whistle blowing activity and

the adverse employment action.”
[4]

The problem is that last clause. Everyone who’s ever had a job knows that mistakes happen every day.

Deadlines are missed, projects contain errors, and goals aren’t met. Bosses who have it in for you aren’t

going to have many difficulties converting those mishaps into reasons for denying wage hikes and even

outright firing. In your heart you may know—everyone may know—that you’re suffering retaliation for

reporting the company, but proving it can be difficult.

The bottom line is—and as the previous survey shows—if you publicly divulge information seriously

damaging your employer, you’re probably going to be gone. And even if you find some protection in one or

another law, it’s difficult to imagine that your career is going anywhere inside the company. Worse still,

prospective new employers are, very likely, going to hesitate before extending a job to someone who has

already caused serious problems for a former employer. Taken all together, the bleak reality is that in

most cases whistle-blowers can’t count on getting back the life they had before they publicly disclosed

their organization’s misdeeds.

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Is Whistle-Blowing Morally Required?

Given the abundant reasons—financial, professional, emotional, and ethical—against whistle-blowing, are

there any cases where a moral argument can be formed to require publicizing an organization’s unethical

actions? Probably, but they’re few. Here’s a possible rule of thumb: whistle-blowing is required when the

act can prevent harm to others in ways that are serious and go beyond the bottom line. If someone is

getting ripped off, the reasoning goes—if an advertising company is overcharging its clients—whistle-

blowing may be justified, but not required. All that’s at stake is money. On the other hand, if a nuclear

power plant is being constructed near a residential area and you learn the contracting company you work

for is using cheap cement to boost the profit margin, it seems as though you have little choice—the weight

of elementary personal integrity in the face of potentially lethal wrongdoing probably requires personal

sacrifice.

What about the hypothetical Chris Foreman situation? You’re working with him and have acquired

sufficient evidence to know that he’s selling out his client by sending their ad dollars to Forbes magazine

in exchange for Highlander nights. You’ve reported the matter internally and received no response. Do

you go public? You’d certainly be justified in taking the story to Ad Age magazine. Just running down the

list of conditions justifying whistle-blowing, they all get checked:

1. There’s clear evidence of continuing wrongdoing by the organization.

2. The wrongdoing is serious (at least in the world of advertising).

3. The organization’s established, internal channels for reporting and correcting problems have been

exhausted.

4. There’s unmistakable and convincing evidence of misconduct.

5. There’s reason to believe that whistle-blowing will resolve the problem.

The question remains, however, whether the issue affects life beyond business and the bottom line. It

doesn’t appear to. At bottom, this is the case of a client—AT&T mobile phone services—getting poor

service from an Omnicom company. That should be corrected, and presumably market forces will correct

it sooner or later, but whether they do or don’t, there’s no requirement here to seriously jeopardize your

own financial, professional, and emotional welfare.

What about the case of Leo Burnett? Again here a client is getting a raw deal, but there’s an important

difference: this is the army, not a telephone company. If it’s true that the recruiting budget is being

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seriously hindered, the situation may be crossing the line from justified whistle-blowing to justified and

required. If it does cross that line, the reason will be that protecting your own financial and emotional

welfare is trumped by the responsibility to help soldiers in war resist mortal danger as totally as possible.

The fact that the army isn’t getting the best recruits possible doesn’t just affect people in the pocketbook,

it threatens those on a live battlefield. Faced with that reality, it will be hard for individuals including

Burnett employees Hamilton and Casey to keep quiet just because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 Third-party obligations arise when you know of wrongdoing by an organization or by individuals within it,

and though you aren’t directly at fault, you’re in a position to correct the problem.

 In some cases, third-party obligations can be opportunities to sabotage a fellow worker for personal gain.

 Responses to third-party obligations include reporting the problem inside the organization for correction

and publicizing the problem, also known as whistle-blowing.

 Because whistle-blowing harms the organization, employees must take into account their responsibility to

defend the organization’s interests before publicly decrying the wrongdoing.

 In some cases whistle-blowing is not justified, in some it is, and in some extreme cases, whistle-blowing

may be ethically required.

 In practical terms, whistle-blowing can be devastating for the employee.

R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S

1. Create a hypothetical third-party obligation involving an employee of a major company.

2. What does it mean to deploy weaponries ethics?

3. What questions can be asked to help determine whether whistle-blowing is justified?

4. What questions can be asked to help determine whether whistle-blowing is ethically required?

5. Why might an employee hesitate before whistle-blowing?

6. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act tries to protect whistle-blowers. Why is it not very effective?

[1] “Code of Conduct,” Omnicom Group, last updated October 16, 2008, accessed May 19,

2011, http://www.omnicomgroup.com/corporategovernance/codeofconduct.

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[2] Mehhen Streit, “Leo Burnett Settles Suit for $15.5 Million,” Chicago Business, January 6, 2009, accessed May

19, 2011, http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=32498.

[3] Survey cited in Manuel Velasquez, Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Pearson, 2006), 378.

[4] Welch v. Cardinal Bankshares Corp., 2003-SOX-15 at 35 (ALJ 2004).

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7.3 Company Loyalty

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Define company loyalty.

2. Elaborate three degrees of company loyalty.

Two Kinds of Loyalty

There is narrow company loyalty and broad company loyalty. The narrow definition pertains to

employment: the loyal employee sticks with the company instead of looking for work elsewhere, especially

during economic booms when jobs are plentiful and moving on is easy.

This kind of loyalty, however, is in trouble according to an article from the Harvard Business School: “The

very nature of the relationship between employers and employees has undergone a fundamental shift:

Today, workers not only don’t expect to work for decades on end for the same company, but they don’t

want to. They are largely disillusioned with the very idea of loyalty to organizations.”
[1]

Part of the reason for the shift—and part of the reason employees don’t stay at companies for decades—is

that many employers don’t hesitate to fire their workers at the drop of the hat when it serves the

company’s interest. On the other side, according to the article, it’s also true that today’s workers don’t

hesitate to move on to a new job when a better one, or maybe just a different one, comes along. Regardless

of who went first, the fact is company loyalty—whether it’s going from the company to the worker or the

worker to the company—isn’t what (we are told) it once was.

The broad definition of company loyalty goes beyond employment questions and measures an employee’s

willingness to sacrifice income, leisure time, personal relationships, family responsibilities, and general

life aspirations in the name of the organization. To create this dynamic of sacrifice, two distinct kinds of

relationships with the organization are required:

1. Attachment to the organization that is non-instrumental. This means the attachment isn’t maintained

only because it serves the employee’s concrete interests, such as the need for a salary to pay the rent and

grocery bills.

2. A deposited value in the organization that goes beyond any individual and their attachment; the

organization’s value continues even without those who currently feel it.

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Probably, there’s not a lot of this kind of deep loyalty in the advertising field. Agencies are constantly

stalking new clients, even trying to steal them from others. For their part, most clients are constantly

looking for better deals and ways to refresh their image, and they are usually open to proposals from new

firms interested in handling their communication. More, companies that employ advertising agencies

constantly “put their account up for review,” which means the current account holder has to compete with

new entrants just to maintain the business. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part

advertising agencies are constantly clinging to the business they have, seeking new opportunities, and

always on the lookout for fast money. In that kind of cutthroat environment—one where it’s your job to

sing the praises of Burger King one day and McDonald’s the next—it’s going to be difficult for workers to

feel as though they should (or even can) be true to their current employer.

Other kinds of organizations seem more likely to instill feelings of loyalty. A religious hub—a church, a

synagogue, a mosque—is one obvious example. Most priests are attached to, and deeply concerned by, the

welfare of their church; they serve their institution and aren’t working there for the money (which

probably isn’t great). Further, most also believe their institution has value beyond them: the importance

was there before they arrived (or were even born) and will continue after they leave. Taken together, these

elements create space for true employee loyalty to the organization. Something similar—the existence of a

space for labor that’s not about money and similar rewards—could be found surrounding many who work

for Greenpeace, Doctors Without Borders, political parties, the CIA, the United Nations.

Other professions open on both sides of the line—that is, there’s ample space for an instrumental

relationship (I keep this job because it makes me happy) and one based on broad loyalty. Some medical

doctors are in it for the money but others for the care, for the principle that bringing health to others is a

good cause. Law is another example. Ambulance-chasing lawyers just want payoffs, but some judges

believe in the law as something larger than themselves and a basic force for civilization that’s worth

serving. Moving down to street level, there are police officers who just like a steady paycheck and others in

the field to serve and protect: they see their work as improving the lives of others and the general

community.

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Three Degrees of Loyalty

Within a dynamic of employee loyalty, there are three levels of dedication: obedience loyalty, balanced

loyalty, and free agency.

Obedience loyalty, which is an extreme case, works from the idea that the organization is worthy and the

employee is comparatively worthless or only worthwhile to the extent he or she serves the organization.

This extreme will be reached only rarely, but there are glimmers of it in some professional activities. One

quick way to identify these kinds of labors is to check whether the truly dedicated are willing to sacrifice

even their lives for the cause their organization embodies. The armed forces come to mind here. Some

political organizations command this devotion, especially in revolutionary times. Some workers’ devotion

to their labor union has been sufficient to put their lives in danger. The exploring scientist Charles Darwin

believed in accumulating knowledge and put his life at risk in the field as he tracked rare species and

ecosystems.

Not so dramatic or extreme, some professions and organizations can suck the emotional life out of

employees. Or they may take vast chunks of the employee’s time. Undercover police work exemplifies by

requiring a loyalty reflected as self-sacrifice to an extent few of us would contemplate. April Leatherwood,

for instance, went undercover in Memphis for an entire year. Almost entirely separated from family and

friends, she lived on the street, wore the same clothes every day, went without brushing her teeth, and

rarely bathed. That was an ugly year of her life, one sacrificed for the job.
[2]

Balanced loyalty is a situation where both the employee and the organization recognize in each other an

independent value. In this case, the employee can be expected to make sacrifices—possibly even do things

he or she would normally consider unethical—in the name of serving the larger organization. One example

would be a lawyer working in a public defender’s office, one who believes that the system of law and the

rules of its enforcement are noble and should be respected to some important extent that is independent

of the particular lawyer’s welfare and beliefs. The loyalty can be reflected in a number of ways. First, it’s

simply the case that most public defender positions don’t pay as well as similar posts in private firms.

Pushing further, the public defender may be asked to represent and defend a client she knows

(or strongly suspects) is guilty. In this case, presumably, she’s being asked to do something she wouldn’t

do in her day-to-day life—that is, serve the interests of a guilty man. More, presenting a full-blown legal

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case for the defendant’s innocence would essentially be lying and, again, something the lawyer might not

typically do.

At the same time, this lawyer probably won’t be sacrificing everything; she’ll recognize that her life and

aspirations have value also, and there may come a point where she decides the sacrifices demanded by the

job are too great to bear. Perhaps she’s just had a child and needs to up her income, or, maybe a man she

helped set free has committed a gruesome crime. However the situation might be, when the lawyer leaves

the office of the public defender for a higher paying job at a large private firm, she has demonstrated a

balanced sense of loyalty. She’s willing to sacrifice in the name of a larger organization she respects. But

only up to a point.

Other demonstrations of balanced loyalty to the organization could include

 buying the company’s products (though they aren’t the personal preference),

 evangelizing in public life (telling your friends how great the company or its products are),

 voting for the political candidate the company affirms will best serve its interests,

 moving for the company.

Free agency is the extreme on the bottom end: the absence of loyalty. Some theorists propose that this

should be the default state for most employees for this reason: it’s ultimately impossible to be loyal to a

typical company because profit-making institutions just aren’t the kinds of things that can properly

demand or receive any loyalty. The entire idea of loyalty, the argument goes, only exists in a reality where

individuals stand by others to some extent without conditions (example: parents who love each other and

their children unconditionally). Money-making businesses, on the other hand, are incapable of that kind

of unconditional fidelity. On the contrary, the only desire most private enterprises know is the one to

serve its own interests by making more profits. If that’s right—if companies have no loyalty to give—then

its employees can’t enter into that kind of relationship. Instead, in the business world at least, you and I

are forced to pursue our own interests—a higher salary or whatever—just as the larger company pursues

its own.

Translating this into the working world, the absence of company loyalty is the idea that workers find value

in their organization only because it serves their own interests. Of course it’s impossible to know the souls

of others, or exactly what their deepest values are, but there might be a hint of this free-agent loyalty in

the Leo Burnett case. Two high-level and highly paid workers served the company well—and were

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compensated well—until they turned whistle-blower against the firm. When vice president Hamilton and

comptroller Casey alleged that Leo Burnett was overbilling the government for their work for the US

Army, they weren’t just doing the right thing, they were doing a lucrative thing for themselves since the

False Claims Act promised 30 percent of damages the government obtained. If the money is

the reason they turned on the agency, they exemplify free-agent loyalty. They worked hard for the

organization because the pay was good, but the moment they saw the chance to get even more money by

turning against it, they jumped. At bottom, that means, their loyalty is only to themselves.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 Company loyalty defined narrowly concerns employees sticking with the organization instead of looking

for work elsewhere.

 Company loyalty defined broadly emerges from the idea that the organization possesses nobility that’s

worth serving, even if employees don’t benefit personally from the contribution.

 The three degrees of company loyalty are obedience loyalty (the worker exists to serve the organization’s

interests), balanced loyalty (workers and organizations share interests), and free agency (the organization

exists to serve the worker’s interests).

R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S

1. Name an organization that might inspire obedience loyalty. Why is obedience inspired? What does the

loyalty look

like?

2. Name an organization that might inspire balanced loyalty. Why is it inspired? What does the loyalty look

like?

3. Name an organization that might inspire an attitude of free agency. Why is it inspired? What does the free

agency look like?

4. Take a career you’re (considering) pursuing. On the scale from obedience loyalty to free agency, where do

you imagine most employees in that line of work are located? Why?

5. [1] Lauren Keller Johnson, “Rethinking Company Loyalty,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge,

September 19, 2005, accessed May 19, 2011,http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5000.html.

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6. [2] Kristina Goetz, “A Year of Living Dangerously Takes a Toll on Undercover Memphis

Officer,” Commercial Appeal, August 30, 2009, accessed May 19,

2011,http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/aug/30/year-of-living-dangerously-takes-its-toll.

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7.4 Stress, Sex, Status, and Slacking: What Are the Ethics of Making It through the

Typical Workday?

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E

1. Consider ethical questions attached to several issues commonly arising during the workday.

Bringing the Office Home: High-Stress Work

No book can cover the ethics of everything happening on every job, but four issues arising in most

workplaces sooner or later are stress, sex, status, and slacking off. Starting with stress, what happens if

the workday doesn’t end when the workday ends? For those enduring—or choosing—high-stress jobs,

there’s no five o’clock whistle; even if they’re shopping or watching a baseball game, the job’s effects hum

in the background. One simple example—and also one all of us see on the street every day—come from an

article in the USA Today. It recounts an academic journal’s finding that overweight people pack on still

more pounds when their work continually produces serious anxiety. If you’re overweight, the study shows,

and you’re stressed in the office, there’s a high likelihood your stomach or your thighs are going to keep

growing.
[1]

One of the central arguments Aristotle made in ancient Greece was that doing right isn’t the highest goal

of ethics. The careful understanding of our values and purposes centers on, ultimately, living a good life.

Doing the right thing is part of that goodness, but happiness is there too, so one of the issues stress at

work brings forward is this: how is my decision to accept stressful employment affecting my happiness

and the happiness of those around me? Here are some more specific questions that could be asked on the

way to pinning down the ethics of stress:

 What positive returns, exactly, am I getting from my stressful job?

 Are there prospects for reduced stress in the future?

 What are the costs of the stress? Is it affecting my weight, my leisure time, my friends, my marriage and

family?

 Who is affected? Is anyone else suffering stress because I’m stressed out? Are people suffering from my

stress in other ways?

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Stress at work isn’t only a psychological problem or a medical one—it’s also laced with questions about

value. It’s the most fundamental ethics: what’s worth doing and what isn’t? It’s impossible to know, of

course, exactly where the line should be drawn and when stress is worth accepting. Any answer that will

be justifiable, however, will have to begin with a clear understanding of exactly what the costs and benefits

are.

Office Romance

Hooking up at work is one eternal way of making the time fly, but what’s going on in today’s offices is

somewhat different from the past. An article from the Wall Street Journal indicates how the meaning of

sex in the office is shifting: “Marriage is a priority for most Americans—more than 90 percent of American

adults eventually marry—but these days it may not happen, as it so often did before, in the immediate

post-high-school or post-college years. The truth is that we’re marrying later.”
[2]

When marriages were typically celebrated at the end of the schooling years, work-related romances went

hand in hand with infidelities. In that environment, questions arose about the organization’s role in any

affair that may be occurring during company time.

The entire context of discussion changes, however, when a large number of people flowing into the

workforce are unmarried and are looking to wed. Inevitably, the office is going to become a mating

ground—people pass eight hours a day there—and one of the questions young workers are going to start

asking when they think about jobs and careers is, will I be able to meet someone if I get into one or

another line of work?

The aspiration to connect introduces a thorny dimension to employment decisions made by young people

(and some older ones too). If you’re a guy working on a heavy construction job, the pay may be good, but

there’s probably not going to be a woman in sight. On the other hand, doing the coursework to earn

paralegal certification may be a headache, but getting into the field isn’t a bad way to meet successful and

interesting women.

What’s going on here is that as society changes—as marriage and family life get pushed back into time that

used to be reserved for work—the factors shaping the way we think about which jobs are more desirable

than others simply on a day-to-day basis are changing, and part of your responsibility to yourself is to

keep track of what you really want from your 9 to 5 time. One of the standard moral obligations we share

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is the responsibility to be sincere not only with others but also with ourselves about important decisions

touching the business part of life. And if romance is part of what you want from work, then the

possibilities have to be taken into account just like salary and other benefits.

Status

Chris Foreman, the media buyer who enjoyed yacht evenings on the Highlander and tickets to all kinds of

major events, received a piddling salary. He thought about changing jobs but decided not to. One reason

was that all the entertainment added a lot of indirect money to his income. There was another reason

too—the special, VIP privileges he constantly received from his benefactors: “There’s a feeling of

superiority. When you pass by a line at a screening because you’re on the list you do get that ego boost.

You’re thinking, Ha, ha! I’m not a chump.”
[3]

Status on the job makes a difference in quotidian working life, but it’s hard to quantify; it’s not like a

salary, which is an objective number and can be directly compared with others on a pay scale. How much

is it worth, the question is, to wing by others forced to stand in line?

Knotting matters further, defining exactly what counts as status isn’t easy, and any answer is going to

move and slide depending on who you talk to. For some, being a lawyer is impressive and lucrative, for

others it’s dirty and, well, lucrative. For some, being a test pilot is exciting and respectable, for others it’s

scary and weird. Many people seated in first class on an airplane rush to get on early so that all the

economy travelers get to see them as they file past. Some of those people headed toward the back of the

plane see the first-class passengers as legitimate power elites, but others get the feeling that most of them

are really chumps: the reason they’re in first class is because they used frequent-flyer miles to bump up,

and the reason they have a lot of those is because their bosses always make them take the trip to see

clients instead of bothering to do it themselves.

More generally, in the world of New York City media buyers, status seems linked with superiority, with

being visibly more privileged than those forced to stand in lines. For others, however, status will be

quieter. The teacher, the nurse—they find status not as superiority but as social importance.

Conclusion. Status means different things to different people, but anyone looking to get it from a job

should ask how much is really there, and how much is it going to help me get out of bed in the morning

and want to go to work?

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Slacker’s Paradise

Typical ways of getting through the day include throwing yourself into your work (frequently with the

hope of a promotion or pay raise), firing up an office romance, and enjoying the status a post allows.

Another way of making it from 9 to 5 is by trying to avoid doing work, by working to do as little as

possible. This is the slacker reality, and there are two routes into it: Personal slackers adopt the attitude

for their own private reasons. The context slacker is dedicated to not working because the incentive

system of the labor contract—or some other external factor—encourages slacking off.

Beginning with the personal slacker, the attitude starts with a decision: You take a typical job and make it

your project to expend as little effort as possible. The reasons for adopting this stance depend on the

person. Maybe there’s a passive-aggressive element, some personal frustration with life or perhaps a

somewhat idealistic attempt to make a statement. In any case, the motives behind this kind of behavior

should be pursued in a psychology course. Here all that matters is that for one reason or another the

private decision gets made to get through the day by working to not work.

The second slacker pathway starts with a context. Here’s an example from an online discussion board:

“Haha I worked in a union job and they were there to punch in…take a lunch…take 2 15min breaks…and

punch out. They had n0 incentive to work hard because they would get a 0 dollar raise.”
[4]

The key here is the incentive, the idea that working hard doesn’t benefit the worker because labor

agreements are so protective and constricting that, on one side, it’s almost impossible to fire a worker, and

on the other, it’s nearly impossible to reward one for superior performance. That means there are islands

in the general economy where the traditional rule regarding performance and reward—the rule that doing

well gets you ahead—doesn’t apply very well.

One of the curiosities of these islands is that it’s not right to conclude that there’s no incentive to do

anything. Actually, there is an incentive system in place even when, as the discussion board poster writes

it, “hard work gets a 0 dollar raise.” In this case, the incentive is negative. If union rules (or whatever rules

happen to be in effect) mean workers can’t compete against each other with the best performer winning a

better post, the workers can still compete. It’s just that since wages are fixed, the competition turns

negative: the most successful worker is the one who manages to do the least work. It makes perfect sense:

if you do less work than anyone else, and you’re paid the same amount as everyone else, you have, in fact,

found a way to win. You get the highest salary; you’re the one paid most for the least work.

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Is slacking ethically acceptable? Whether someone is a contextual or personal slacker, when success is

defined not as how well you do but how little you do, two basic questions arise:

1. Is someone or some organization being cheated?

2. Is there something fundamentally unethical about being a slacker?

The first question applied to those trapped—willingly or not—in contextual slackerism leads quickly to the

conclusion that the organization bears at least as great a burden of responsibility as the employee for

deficient work motivation. Applied to the personal slacker, the question about whether an employer was

cheated becomes more difficult. There does seem to be an element of reneging on implicit or explicit

pledges to fulfill responsibilities here, but it’s also true that most employment contracts in the United

States (though not so much in Europe where this question would require more prolonged consideration)

leave the organization broad latitude for dismissing workers whose performance is inadequate.

Next, is there something fundamentally unethical about slacking off? Most basic ethical theories are going

to return some form of a yes verdict. From a utilitarian perspective—one trying to maximize the common

good and happiness—it seems like problems are going to arise in most workplaces when coworkers are

forced to pick up assignments the slacker was supposed to complete or could have completed easily with

just a bit more effort. Similarly, basic ethics of duties include the one we all have to maximize our own

potential and abilities, and rigorously avoiding work seems, in most cases, to run against that aspiration.

Probably, a satisfying ethical defense of the slacker lifestyle would need to be founded on a personal

project going well beyond the limited economic world. Slacking off, in other words, would need to be part

of someone’s life ambition, and therefore its questions belong to general ethics, not the more limited field

of economic values treated here.

K E Y T A K E A W A Y S

 Stress at work invites ethical considerations of workers’ obligations to their own happiness.

 Office romance may broaden the range of values applying to career choices.

 Status deriving from one’s work can be an important compensation, but it is difficult to quantify.

 Slacking off—working to not work—may result from an employee’s work environment or it may be a

personal choice.

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R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S

1. What are some of the ways stress at work can cause unhappiness in life?

2. Why the office is an important scene of romance in today’s world?

3. What do you imagine the rewards of status to be?

4. What kind of work contract would encourage slackerism?

5.

6. [1] Nanci Hellmich, “Study: Overweight People Gain More When Stressed by Work,” USA Today, July 8,

2009, accessed May 19, 2011,http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2009-07-08-obesity-

stress_N.htm.

7. [2] Christine Whelen, “Older but Wiser,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2006.

8. [3] Sarah Bernard, “Let Them Eat Crab Cakes,” New York, accessed May 19,

2011,http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/2472.

9. [4] Eazy E, “IS it me or are most Union workers lazy?,” Yahoo! Answers, accessed May 19,

2011, http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081008004353AAn1iL7.

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7.5 Case Studies

Payola and the iPhone App

The word payola traces back to rock and roll’s early days, back when the only large-scale way new acts

could get their name and music out was on the radio. Deejays in the 1960s controlled their own playlists

much more than today, so a band could drive into town, play a few concerts, and pay off a few deejays to

get their songs into the rotation. When they rolled out toward the next stop, they left behind the

impression that they were the next big thing.

It’s not illegal for a deejay, radio station, or anyone at all to accept money in exchange for playing

someone’s music, but US law does make pay for play illegal if the sponsorship isn’t openly divulged, if the

song isn’t treated, in other words, as a commercial.

Today’s media world provides almost infinite ways for musicians, video commentators, moviemakers, and

iPhone app developers to get word out about what they’re doing. Anyone can post a video on YouTube or

give away software on a web page. Payola is still out there, though. Wired magazine ran a story about it in

the world of iPhone apps.

It works like this. You invent an iPhone app but can’t get anyone to notice. What do you do? One

possibility is offer money to one of the well-known iPhone app review sites in exchange for a review of

your creation. That gets the word out pretty well, so developers are starting to pay up. This modern payola

scheme is enraging the iPhone community, however. Jason Snell, who works for Apple’s own app-review

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website complains, “Readers need to know that true editorial reviews are fair, and aren’t the product of

any quid pro quo involving money or any other favors.”
[1]

Michael Vallez, owner of the app-review site Crazy Mike’s Apps, disagrees. He charges for reviews without

disclosing that to his readers, but he doesn’t guarantee a positive report. If he thinks the app isn’t worth

buying, he sends the money back and cancels the review.

The Wired article concludes with an opinion from Kenneth Pybus, a professor of journalism and mass

communication: “Undisclosed paid reviews are indisputably unethical because they manipulate the

public. That’s an easy call to say it’s ethically wrong because that is a disservice to readers. It ought to be

information that applies to readers and not information that advances you financially.”

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Professor Pybus believes there’s a conflict of interest operating when Vallez accepts money to write

reviews for his website Crazy Mike’s Apps. What, exactly, is the conflict?

2. Vallez says that his actions do not cause a conflict of interest, only the appearance of a conflict.

o What’s the difference between a conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict of interest?

o How could Vallez argue that in his case there’s only an appearance, and, on close inspection, there

really is no conflict here?

3. Three standard strategies for alleviating ethical concerns surrounding conflicts of interest are

o transparency,

o recusal,

o organizational codes.

How could each of these strategies be applied to the conflict-of-interest issue at Crazy Mike’s

Apps?

4. You develop an iPhone app and you pay Vallez to review it. He tries the app, likes it, and writes up

a positive paragraph.

o Make the case to defend the payment as an ethically acceptable gift. Are there limits to how much

you could give before it would shift from a gift to a bribe? If there is a limit, how was the number

chosen?

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o Vallez says that if he doesn’t like an app he returns the money and refuses to review it. Does this

fact interfere with the possibility of justifying the payments as a standard, business-type gift?

5. Old style payola—paying to get a rock band on the airwaves isn’t dead. According to a story from

ABC News, the practice is alive and well; the only difference is that it’s no longer the deejays who

get the cash, it’s high-level executives because they’re the ones who set today’s playlists. Here’s a

comment from Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins: “I think back in the ’70s they used to pay

people with hookers and cocaine, and now they’re just doing it with straight-up money. So they

can all go out and buy their own hookers and cocaine.”
[2]

There’s a difference in the business world between providing entertainment and giving gifts. What

is the distinction?

o Why might entertainment be considered less ethically objectionable than gifts?

o Leaving aside moral concerns about hookers and drugs, ethically, is there a difference between a

rock group’s manager inviting radio executives out on a hooker and cocaine evening on one side

and just sending those cash on the other? If there’s a difference, what is it? If not, why not?

The Decorator’s Kickback

On a message board, Ms. G. C. from Miami writes,

Here’s the problem: an interior decorators bid is broken down into two parts-(A) the decorator’s

services and (B) the cost of labor and supplies. Most customers think (B) is a fixed cost-they forget

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it’s not the decorator’s fault if cabinetmakers charge an arm and a leg. So, where do customers

look the closest when they’re comparing costs? That’s right, (A)-the decorator’s fee.

Well, decorators are creative people and for years they’ve been doing some very creative bidding.

They’ve been low balling (A) and padding (B), expecting the laborers to kick back a percentage of

their inflated fees to the decorator. Surprised? Everyone’s doing it. Everyone, that is, except me.

It’s deceptive. And as a Christian, I think it’s just plain wrong.

The customer’s final cost is about the same either way you cut it, so most decorators don’t feel

they’re doing anything wrong. Are they right?

Needless to say, “blowing the whistle” on such a widespread and accepted practice would only

damage my professional reputation.
[3]

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Mrs. G. C. confronts a third-party obligation. What is it?

2. Ethics can be weaponries—that is, used in your personal interest. Show how this could be the case here.

Does the fact that she would benefit by getting these kickbacks eliminated somehow make her position

less morally respectable? Why or why not?

3. Typically, according to Mrs. G. C, a client contracts an interior decorator. Later that decorator hires a

laborer, and the laborer gives the designer a kickback. There’s a conflict of interest here, what is it? What

is the ethical case against this kickback scheme?

4. Consequence theories of ethics represent the point of view that acts themselves are not good or

bad; all that matters are the consequences. Therefore, lying isn’t bad if it happens that a fleeing

criminal is asking you which way is the best escape route, and you point him down the street

leading to the police station. Duty theorists, by contrast, believe that certain acts including lying

and stealing are wrong regardless of the context and consequences.

o Do you suppose Mrs. G. C. adheres to a consequence ethics or a duty ethics? Why?

o Could you use the idea of consequence ethics to try to convince her to simply join the crowd and

do what everyone else is doing? What would that case look like?

5. If you wanted to put an end to this pervasive kickback practice in the interior decorating world

and only had time to present one argument, which of the following would you choose?

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o The practice should be stopped because it involves unethical kickbacks.

o It should be stopped because it’s dishonest in the sense that consumers are misled.

o It should be stopped because the straight shooter is getting the shaft.

Why did you choose that argument and how could it be elaborated more fully?

6. Imagine that Mrs. G. C. from Miami reveals her name and makes a whistle-blowing cause out of

her unhappiness with the standard practice in her profession.

o What kind of reprisals and negative effects might she expect?

o Do you believe whistle-blowing is justified in this situation? Why or why not?

o Is it required? Why or why not?

Sex, Money, and Whistle-Blowing

Like all recent NBA All-Star players, Kevin Johnson made a lot of money during his pro basketball career.

It drained out fairly quickly too. A few hundred-thousand went to the family of a sixteen-year-old high-

school girl in Phoenix after a he-said, she-said sex accusation. A decade later, a similar story emerged, but

at a different place: this time it was three girls in Sacramento, California, who attended St. Hope

Academy. They took their stories—each told of a similar incident involving Johnson—to the recruitment

advisor, Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez. Soon after, Ms. Wong-Hernandez was gone. Her resignation was a

protest over the way the complaints were handled internally at the school, which was by dismissing them.

Not only did St. Hope Academy take no action, the local police also decided not to press any charges in a

case that essentially came down to one person’s word against another’s.

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St. Hope Academy, as it happens, wasn’t a public school but a private business, and Kevin Johnson was

the founder and CEO. A lot of the money flowing into the young institution came from the federal

government as grants from the AmeriCorps program. After accusations surfaced that the grant money

wasn’t spent appropriately, the school agreed to pay back $423,836.50 to the government (about half of

what the school had received). The first payment, about $73,000, was made by Kevin Johnson himself.

So things probably would have ended, except for an AmeriCorps inspector general named Gerald Walpin.

He believed Johnson had gotten way too good a deal: the school should have been forced to pay back

much more of the grant money it had received. On May 5, 2009, he took the accusation to a California

congressman who in turn brought public attention to the issue. On June 10, Mr. Walpin was fired. In an

editorial statement, the Washington Times complained, “Mr. Walpin was fired with no explanation and

no warning to Congress; even though the act governing inspectors general says IGs can be removed only

after the president gives Congress 30 days’ notice and a reason for the firing. Rather than investigate the

IG’s serious complaints, Mr. Obama fired him. In short, he snuffed out the whistleblower rather than heed

the whistle.”
[4]

A local Sacramento TV station doing some follow-up uncovered a report detailing hush money payments

at St. Hope and noted that the former NBA All-Star “often described himself as a personal friend” of

another avid basketball player, President Obama.
[5]

Q U E S T I O N S

1. How were the following two faced with a third-party obligation?

o Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez

o Gerald Walpin

2. In general, there are three possible responses to third-party obligations, do nothing, report the

problem, become a whistle-blower. How would you categorize the response made by

o Wong-Hernandez?

o Walpin?

3. What questions can be asked to help determine whether whistle-blowing is justified? How might

they be answered in the case of

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o Wong-Hernandez?
o Walpin?
4. What questions can be asked to help determine whether whistle-blowing is ethically required?

How might they be answered in the case of

o Wong-Hernandez?
o Walpin?

Loyal to the Badge

When police officer April Leatherwood went undercover in Memphis, she changed her name to Summer

Smith. She didn’t change her socks for a year—no showers or brushing her teeth either.

Her daily routine was to hang out on the street smoking and trying to befriend drug addicts. They’d take

her to their dealers, where she’d make a buy and then try to find out who was the next person up the

ladder. Her work resulted in about three hundred arrests, everyone from two-bit drug sellers to major

movers who organized the street-level crime from luxury apartments.

Why’d she do it? According to the newspaper article relating her story, she loved the camaraderie of the

department and its protect-and-serve mission.

When she emerged from the undercover program, she was promoted to detective. Unfortunately, her

three-year romantic partner had moved on, and it was difficult to get the bad memories out of her mind.

Still, when the reporter asked whether she’d do it again, she said, “Yeah.”
[6]

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Q U E S T I O N S

1. The two ideas on which company loyalty—or organizational loyalty to broaden the title—is built

are the following:

o An attachment to the organization that is non-instrumental, meaning the attachment is not

maintained only because it serves the employee’s concrete interests, such as the need for a

salary.

o A deposited value in the organization that goes beyond any individual and their attachment: the

organization’s value continues even without those who currently feel it.

How are these ideas manifested in the case of April Leatherwood?

2. Three measures on the scale of loyalty intensity are obedience loyalty, balanced loyalty, and free agency.

Given what you’ve read about Leatherwood, where would you put her on this scale? Why?

3. Think about one of the career lines you’re considering, or the one you’re currently on, and

imagine your company loyalty was similar to Leatherwood’s.

o What kinds of sacrifices do you imagine you’d make for the organization?

o Thinking about yourself, really, would you be able to make those sacrifices?

4. Leatherwood’s pay is not high, about $50,000 a year. That works out to about $7 an hour for the

twelve undercover months. Obviously she enjoyed no status while she was undercover. Now,

however, she has appeared in the newspaper and made detective grade in the department. In

your opinion from what you’ve read, do you believe she has acquired a level of status through her

work?

o If she has acquired a status, how would you describe it, what is it based on, how is it different

from the status enjoyed by, say, a senator or a movie star?

o Does this status—assuming she’s acquired it—compensate what she suffered? Explain.

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The Gawker Sex Tape

All kinds of things happen in advertising agencies. Part of the reason is the diversity: a typical medium-to-

large agency requires many different kinds of work, and that brings together a rainbow of people. There

are suited, business types in the client services section. They work with budgets and bulleted lists and

connect the agency with the corporate client. Down the hall the planners dress more casually and study

demographics and culture. They invent market segments with names like soccer moms and then devise

strategies for appealing to soccer moms’ distinct interests and tastes. Further down the hall, there are the

agency’s actual commercial makers. They call themselves creative talent and are free to appear for work

in jeans and ratty t-shirts. For their paycheck, they plan the short films the rest of us call TV commercials.

The typical large agency also needs some HR people, accountants, computer techs, and lawyers.

Most advertising agencies have a pretty good mix of men and women, and in general, there are a lot of

young people in the field because the long hours and short deadlines tend to lead workers to seek

employment elsewhere eventually.

Most agencies are good places for romance. The chemicals are right: young workers, long hours, the

excitement of million-dollar accounts, and lots of different types of people for different tastes. Those are

also, as it happens, good ingredients for sex, as people at BBDO (an Omnicom agency) in New York City

discovered when a grainy cell phone movie went viral. Shot by a guy in the creative department, he stuck

his camera over the top of a cubicle and caught a nude couple wedged into the back corner.

As far as the scandal went, it didn’t take long for industry insiders to figure out who’d been caught, and

from there, the information spread that they were both married to other people. The website Gawker.com

followed the action closely, posting the original film and then running follow-ups. In a nutshell, this is

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what happened. The romantic couple continued at their jobs. No word about how their marriages are

doing. The filmer got fired. He downloaded the footage onto his computer and then sent it around to a few

friends. He had nothing to do—he says—with the fact that a few weeks later it was all over the web. In his

words,

It ended up on Gawker and Media bistro and then the word got back to me that all the creative’s

were sending it around. I freaked. I thought it was amazing how something could go viral and

end up online so quickly when I had nothing to do with it really.
[7]

Well, he was the one who filmed and originally distributed it.

The discussion posted on the Gawker web page is probably hotter than the sex that got everything going.

Many issues come up, including: Why did the filmer get fired while the adulterers got to keep their

jobs? One answer someone wrote in is that filming and distributing a sex tape is unethical (and possibly

illegal if minors end up seeing it). A poster who calls himself BritSwedeGuy responds:

How could you be sacked for filming something you could see at work?

Would he have been sacked if he’d taken the video to HR?

Probably not.

So is he being sacked for withholding evidence then?

That only makes sense if the evidence was of a sackable offence.

Has he been sacked for passing the video on? Surely he’s a whistle-blower in that case and ought

to be protected.

This is his argument. First, it doesn’t make sense to fire the filmer for recording the sex, since the act took

place in public, and anyone (tall) could’ve seen it. The perpetrators couldn’t reasonably object to being

filmed if they were exhibiting themselves so openly. Second, if the filmer had taken the film to HR to

report the fact that sex was going on, he probably wouldn’t have been fired, and the entire episode

would’ve been managed internally (and quietly) inside the agency. That means the only justifiable reason

for firing the guy was that he digitalized the video and, in essence, made it possible for others to beam it

across the Internet. If that’s what he did, though, then he’s a whistle-blower and should be protected.

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Q U E S T I O N S

1. If the filmer did take the video to the human resources department, what would he be reporting?

What ethical misdeeds are happening?

o With respect to those misdeeds, where does the line get drawn between flirting for a second and

stripping down for a fifteen-minute frolic?

2. On the question of whistle-blowing—and the possibility that the filmer’s action was ethically

justifiable as a form of whistle-blowing—a poster named Bad Uncle isn’t buying it. He writes, “OK,

I’ll be less glib. I don’t see how f***ing someone is a major ethical violation worthy of whistle-

blowing (fnar)…it’s hardly damaging to a company, its clients, or its employees. Wake me when

their monotonous thrusting implants the seed of fraud into an earnings statement.”

Bad Uncle doesn’t think the filmer could defend himself by claiming to be a whistle-blower. In

your own words, why not? Do you agree? Explain.

3. Do you believe the filmer sensed a company loyalty? Would a stronger sense of company loyalty have

encouraged him to erase the tape instead of disseminating it? Why or why not?

4. Advertising agencies are notorious for fast money and little loyalty to their employees. Many agencies, if

they lose an account, straight off fire many of those who worked on the account even if the loss had

nothing to do with the employee’s work performance (the client may have discontinued a line of products,

for example, and for that reason discontinued the advertising). Given that business attitude, does the

company have a right to demand that employees think of the agency’s interests when doing things like

filming? Why or why not?

5. Work in advertising—especially in the creative department where people often have to actually make ads

for air right now—is very stressful. There’s a lot of money involved and a lot of competition among

creative’s. Do you believe sex at work is an ethically defensible way of alleviating the stress comparable

with taking a cigarette break or just a quick walk around the block? How could the argument be made in

favor?

6. If someone told you they wanted to work in advertising because it’s a good spot to meet someone and get

married (which is probably true at most agencies), do you believe that’s a reasonable decision, one in

harmony with the ethical responsibility to pursue one’s happiness and welfare? Why or why not?

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7. If someone told you they were going to work in advertising because they’d heard it’s a good place for fast,

cheap sex (which it probably is at most agencies), do you believe that’s a reasonable decision, one in

harmony with the ethical responsibility to pursue one’s happiness and welfare? Why or why not?

[1] Brian X. Chen, “Fallout from Wired.com’s iPhone App Payola Story,” Wired, Gadget Lab, March 24, 2010,

accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/app-review-payola-reaction.

[2] Brian Ross, Richard Esposito, and Vic Walter, “Pay to Play: Music Industry’s Dirty Little Secret,” ABCNews.com,

February 8, 2006, accessed May 19, 2011,http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=1591155&page=1.

[3] Ms. G. C. from Miami, “The Case of the Casual Kickback,” Urbana.org.

[4] “Editorial: Stonewalling on Walpin-gate,” The Washington Times, July 10, 2009, accessed May 19,

2011,http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/10/stonewalling-on-walpin-gate.

[5] “Report: Johnson Offered to Pay Accuser,” KCRA.com, November 20, 2009, accessed May 19,

2011, http://www.kcra.com/news/21679385/detail.html.

[6] Kristina Goetz, “A Year of Living Dangerously Takes a Toll on Undercover Memphis Officer,” Commercial Appeal,

August 30, 2009, accessed May 19, 2011,http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/aug/30/year-of-living-

dangerously-takes-its-toll.

[7] Hamilton Nolan, “The Cameraman Speaks: He’s Fired but the Sex Tape Couple Keep Their Jobs,” Gawker,

November 26, 2008, accessed May 19, 2011,http://gawker.com/5099143/the-cameraman-speaks-hes-fired-but-

the-sex-tape-couple-keep-their-jobs.

• Structure Bookmarks

Chapter 7: Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You Have as You Get from 9 to 5
Chapter 7: Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You Have as You Get from 9 to 5
Chapter 7: Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You Have as You Get from 9 to 5
Chapter 7: Employee’s Ethics: Making the Best of the Job You Have as You Get from 9 to 5
from The Business Ethics Workshop was adapted by Saylor Academy and is available under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
license without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensor.