Module #15: Ethical business communication

Leader: Paul Williams, NC State

Members: Chris Anson and Jason Swarts, NC State; John Pomery and Taggart Smith, Purdue; Cynthia Jeffrey, Iowa State; Rodney Stevenson, Wisconsin; Spencer Leineweber, Hawaii; Craig Wishart, Fayetteville State; Maggie VanNorman, grad student; and Kathy Council, SAS.

This module will be based on previous work by team member VanNorman (2004) and Williams. Students will read three different scenarios that ask them to make a decision based on the information given. Each scenario deals with an ethical business communication decision. Viewers are given a range of possible responses and instructed to think about each one, exploring the various consequences of each response.

Objectives:

  • Recognize ethical conflict and the factors that must be considered within the conflict.
  • Understand the process of making an ethical decision.

For each scenario, viewers have the opportunity, after responding, to: 

  • Read what business professionals would do in the same situation.
  • Read what a business ethicist considers when weighing the possible responses.
  • Read and respond to the discussion questions for each scenario.

Here is the first scenario and questions.

Kelly works as a business development consultant for a small nonprofit organization that makes loans to low-income individuals. The loans enable individuals to start a business or expand an existing business. Kelly enjoys the work, since it combines two professional interests: finance and sustainable community development. For example, Kelly recently finalized paperwork for Chris, establishing a low-interest loan and credit line. After Chris struggled to make ends meet with her own minimum wage jobs, she decided to start a lawn care business. She's excited about the prospect of becoming a small business owner who can offer a good service to the community while providing her employees a stable, living wage. Helping people like Chris makes Kelly feel good about her job and the work the nonprofit is doing.

The nonprofit that Kelly works for receives state funding. It must qualify on a yearly basis by meeting the state's strict criteria on loan default rates. This hasn't been a problem in the past, but this year, due to a rough economy, the nonprofit couldn't meet the criteria. Kelly's director was frustrated because the state government had left qualifying criteria unchanged, despite a generally poor economy. Without the state's funding, the nonprofit would be shut down and a significant number of businesses would go unfunded. Kelly's director approached her, asking her to alter the accounting report the nonprofit submits to the state so it would appear that the nonprofit had met the state's criteria.

What should Kelly do?

A. Alter the accounting records. Helping low-income individuals and invigorating the local economy are more important than meeting arbitrary state criteria. The benefits outweigh the risk of closing the nonprofit down if it loses state funding. Kelly is willing to risk being held legally liable for the altered numbers.

B. Ask management to have someone else do the altering. In theory, Kelly doesn't mind management altering the numbers, but doesn't want to be held personally and legally responsible if the nonprofit's altered numbers are made public.

C. Refuse on personal grounds. Even if the state is making its criteria increasingly difficult to meet, altering numbers is never an option.

D. Alert the state's auditor that the nonprofit wants to alter its numbers. This risks the nonprofit being closed permanently, but making an ethical decision is more important. Kelly may be labeled a whistleblower and will probably lose her job, along with all the employees at the nonprofit. Additionally, the nonprofit can no longer help low-income individuals.

E. Quit. Kelly doesn't want to risk being found out, nor can Kelly risk being labeled a whistleblower.

We regret that we do not have space to describe in detail the final seven teams. Our space constraint, however, should not be taken to reflect on the state of a module’s development. All teams are at roughly comparable stages of elaboration and research; descriptions of modules 9-15 are available upon request from the PI.

In addition to developing these fifteen modules, teams will be invited to develop smaller disciplinary-specific modules to be incorporated into the common core of the course. For example, the core currently contains an exercise on plagiarism developed by Dr. Charlotte Bronson (Iowa State U.). The exercise presents a paragraph from a Plant Pathology research article followed by eight sentences presenting ideas in the article. Students must decide which, if any, of the eight sentences are plagiarized. LANGURE participants may decide to develop versions of this module that are specific to their disciplines. For example, using research articles taken from a physics journal, the physics teams may craft a core module of direct relevance to their students. The new physics plagiarism module, in turn, will be inserted into the core course and completed by the physics students while the plant pathology students are completing the plant pathology plagiarism exercise. In this way, even the core course will be tailored to the needs of individual students.