Ryan Flores

10/14/22

Chapter 1

Case Study: Officers and Gentlemen Behaving Badly

The case study is about the rise in sexual harassment in the U.S. military from fall of

2012 to spring of 2014. Many incidents became public during this time when high ranking male

officials started conducting acts towards female officials. Some unprofessional emails got leaked

and those involved were charged with penalties ranging from job termination to having to pay

hefty court fines. The U.S. military started becoming stricter with their policies and put more

qualified candidates in higher positions such as Margaret D. Klein who became senior advisor

for military professionalism since she is very highly educated with a lot of experience and with

her now as senior advisor things started to change.

1. To be in a managerial position requires different requirements than say a retail manager

or HR manager. The reason being is that the level of education is much higher since there

are people of varying specialties and education levels you would have to monitor over.

Another thing is that it is regarded as a separate specialty because you need military

experience and to know how the system works like their ranks and operations. That is

why Adm. Margaret Klein was qualified as a Senior Advisor for Military Professionalism

because she has a master’s degree and was a former naval flight commandant with many

years of experience. Because of this she was deserving of her role so she can control the

ethics and professionalism in the military

2. Since the role Adm. Margaret Klein is stated as an “ethics officer at the pentagon”

Mintzberg’s 10 different managerial roles come in a different order of importance. The

top three important roles she would need is figurehead, leadership, and disseminator. The

reason being is that in the military there needs to be a leader because it is mandatory for

lower ranks to take orders from the higher ups and if she is a figurehead, it’ll make it

more appealing to listen to her and the disseminator is important because in this kind of

environment information is very confidential so she would need to know what

information to give to which employees. Fourth most important is spokesperson because

since she plays a vital role to the public’s eye especially after taking command after the

sexual assault allegations she would need to know how to address this information in a

professional manner to the public when they express their outcry to these controversies.

Disturbance handler is the fifth most important thing being she is head of ethics in the

military she would need to know how to prevent and to handle other military personnel

when they violate the rules. Other aspects include monitor, negotiator, and interpersonal

cluster which in my opinion is in the middle of how important they are. The monitor and

negotiator role are to gain information from various sources which will help the military

and the negotiator role is to give her the power to negotiate with others since she has a lot

of knowledge using her monitor traits. Interpersonal cluster is to help with building

outside connections which in this case would be other militaries from different countries

that way they can become allies. The least important ones are entrepreneur and resource

allocator because in the military change is really hard to make unless given by the

president or the secretary of defense and the resource allocator in her role she doesn’t
 need to know about financial things the only aspect she would need from this trait is the

human resources knowledge.

3. The goals of the U.S. military is to ensure a safe and professional work environment to

fix the bad reputation they got from these controversies. What the military should do is

start getting more diversity in their bigger roles as you see when they gave the Senior

Advisor for Military Professionalism to Adm. Klein since women don’t really get very

high positions and even now there are people from other races getting high positions

which subconsciously would show military personnel that different people can be leaders.

Another thing they should do is add ethics classes to their bootcamps so new recruits can

be educated on new ethical standards. Ethical standards are important in these efforts

because the better standards and which can be solved by having military leaders educate

soldiers which in turn would decrease in these events since now the military will take

disciplinary actions towards these issues and people know what would happen if they

violated these rules.

4. Professional ethics influence job-related activities because it creates a safe work

environment since employees feel at ease since everyone knows what they’re doing and

are acting mannerly. But there are ways that it can apply in unprofessional situations such

as when you are out in public and meet someone new you still present yourself in a

certain way because it is morally ethical and respectable towards others.