Module 6: PCA Ethics

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

From Module 1, the scenario that I decided to use for my personal case study was at a

previous place of employment at a hardware store in California. This hardware store was

very much a local mom and pop style of hardware store that had its fair share of problems.

Most of these problems stemmed from complacent owners and an unwillingness to try new

things to propel the business towards success and to increase revenues. As is common in

small businesses, I wore a variety of hats as the saying goes and performed a wide variety of

roles within the organization. I was a sales associate, cashier, key holder, and window screen

repairman all in a day.

2) Describe how the ethics of the organization influenced the situation.

Within the hardware store, business ethics weren’t of a large concern as there was often

‘funny business’ with large accounts and with individual customers. In regard to individual

customers, when they placed an order for a specific item we didn’t have in stock, the store

owners would often times forget and then it would be up to us to tell the upset customer that

they won’t be receiving their item for another week. Seeing this kind of lack of ethics was

disappointing for use employees as we felt that the store owners were putting their self-

interests above the interests of the customer. Pulling from our textbook, this is almost the

exact opposite of what Medtronic strived to do with their “… serving patients rather than

shareholders”. (Bolman and Deal, 2017).

Another key aspect of the ethics frame in our textbook is the caring and love that creates

a family. This, however, was not present in my organization and there was a noticeable

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 divide between the store owners and use employees. Us employees felt like a family that

cared about each other, but this didn’t feel like the case when speaking with the store owners.

They were in their own world trying to survive one day at a time and didn’t place an

emphasis on creating relationships with us that would lead to us being happier and more

satisfied in our work, leading to less complacency and better performance of our duties. As

we discussed in a previous frame, good relationships create strong team, which create strong

organizations. Teamwork and relationships form the foundation of an organization and assist

in creating a family-esque environment.

3) Recommend how you would apply one of the ethical communities for an alternative

course of action regarding your case.

Considering that the mom and pop hardware store only had a few employees and was

family owned, the approach that I would go with would be that of creating a family with care

and love as outlined in our textbook. With such a small workforce, the need for a sense of

community and teamwork is very important. With such a small group of people in one

workplace, it removes the ability to schedule people in different departments or during

different shifts because those options simply don’t exist. Therefore, the importance of

nipping these problems in the bud, is heightened and should be made a priority by leaders in

the organization.

As our textbook states, “Love is largely absent from modern corporations.” (Bolman and

Deal, 2017) which would open an opportunity for the mom and pop hardware store to gain a

competitive advantage of the large corporations that it competed with. When you genuinely

care about customers, they can feel this and are more likely to come back and frequent your

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 business. This feeling of love for customers starts with the employees feeling loved. When

employees are happy, customers are happy. Therefore, I would start a new ethics culture of a

family environment in the workplace to get the most out of the employees working there.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned

about ethics.

Knowing what I know now, I would place a greater emphasis on altering my own

behavior in order to promote a more ethical workplace environment that would benefit

everyone in the workplace. Change has to start somewhere and that somewhere could be me

as I’m aware of what needs to be done in order to promote an ethical environment. As I

mentioned in previous frames, talking to my coworkers about their thoughts would be a great

way to start the process of change. They may have their own opinions on what’s ethical and

what isn’t, so this would be a good opportunity to gauge our similarities and differences.

When attempting to create change, its important to not get caught up in your own views

being the ones you pay attention to. You risk alienating your team and creating more division

in the workplace than there was previously.

Building upon the textbook’s concept of a family, communication is very important to a

family and doubly so when trying to insight change. When trying to create a more ethical

workplace environment, I would argue that communicating with those around you is an

ethical responsibility of yours to ensure that everyone knows what’s going on during times of

change. After speaking about my coworker’s ethical views, I would speak with them reading

what kind of workplace environment they’d like to be a part of. From there, taking our ideas

to the store owners would allow us to compare our values to theirs and see if there are

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 similarities. After comparing and contrasting, we could work towards implementing a new,

shared, ethical community.

References

Bolman, L. G., and T. E. Deal. Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and

Leadership. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2017.