OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Ethical Communities Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the four ethical communities
2. Apply the ethical communities to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

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

I work for Starbucks as a district manager. I manage a team of 12 store managers, and
upwards of 350 partners (employees). I had a store manager who was showing an
unconscious bias against men. She is an amazing store manager who was excelling in her
store, but she never hired men, only interviewed a few but was always hiring women. I
had another store manager who had an unconscious hiring bias as well, except she
preferred to hire athletes. I noticed this trend with both of them and that it was beginning
to affect their stores. Manager one’s store was beginning to experience a lot of drama and
store two was running into conflict as well. After reflecting on the training for hiring that
our store managers go through, I realized that the two store managers had never gone
through the unconscious bias training or diversity training being that they were older
partners. I had all of my store managers go through it and we had a healthy conversation
about what it means to hire without an unconscious bias and being mindful about creating
diverse teams and what the benefits are.

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

The ethics of Starbucks actually supported me in recognizing that my store managers had
a bias. There have been incidents within Starbucks stores that suggest that there are some
leaders that work for us that did not make ethical decisions, but Starbucks made changes
as an organization to ensure that it didn’t happen again.

3) Recommend how you would apply one of the ethical communities for an alternative
course of action regarding your case.

In my case care and love would have supported an alternative course, for my leaders to
understand that they were not being vulnerable and realizing that they had an
unconscious or conscious bias when hiring. For myself really leaning into this and

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 supporting them through tough conversations could have allowed for this situation to be
solved sooner.

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

I don’t think that I would have done anything differently. As with many of the frames, the
gap was being able to identify this quickly and support my managers through thinking
differently. I found out that they didn’t necessarily have a bias, but how to work through
their unconscious bias.