Business ethics

In a complex, multicultural business environment, it is important that business professionals adhere to ethical standards throughout their daily activities. The goal of this course is to introduce you to concepts and guidelines for ethical courses of actions in business. In order to assess your understanding of the material and your ability to apply the required concepts, you will be asked to take on the role of the ethics director for the company in the scenario. You will be asked to design an ethics curriculum for new employees to address the rights and responsibilities of employees and the ethical relationship between employer and employee. You will also be tasked with developing an ethical dilemma for analysis, offering ethical decisions for evaluation, and examining the role of personal values and goals in the workplace.

SCENARIO
You are the ethics officer of a marketing firm. The company prides itself on only engaging in ethical business practices. In order to ensure that all of its employees understand corporate ethical policy, new employees must attend an ethics training as part of the onboarding process. Additionally, every employee must attend an annual ethics training. These ethical training programs are developed by the marketing firm’s ethics officer (you), the marketing firm’s human resources (HR) director, and an outside consulting firm.

In a joint development session, the team works through the training development materials that will be presented at this year’s two-day ethics training session. This year, the focus is on two primary topics: employees’ rights and responsibilities in the workplace and employer’s ethical responsibilities toward employees. In addition, hypothetical ethical scenarios are developed to evaluate the employees’ understanding of company ethical standards, general ethical decision-making, and desired courses of action.

REQUIREMENTS
Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. An originality report is provided when you submit your task that can be used as a guide.

You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

A. Take on the role of the ethics officer in the scenario and address the following:

1. Describe three rights and responsibilities of employees based on the scenario.

2. Evaluate two ethical responsibilities of the employer within the context of the employer/employee relationship described in the scenario.

3. Develop one ethical business dilemma that can be used to demonstrate employee understanding of the company’s ethical standards.

4. Evaluate the dilemma from part A3 from a utilitarian and relativistic perspective.

5. Describe two common ethical decisions that reflect corporate ethics and responsibilities that employees can face while working in a corporate setting.

Note: These should be different from the ethical business dilemma in part A3.

6. Explain why each ethical decision in part A5 presents an ethical dilemma and how an individual might justify unethical behavior (e.g., common excuses).

B. Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.

C. Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission