CUSTOMER CONFIDENCE ISSUE

You’re working the breakfast shift at a fast-food restaurant when a delivery of milk, eggs, and other dairy products arrives. There’s a story in the local newspaper about

contaminated milk distributed by the dairy that delivers to your restaurant. Upon reading the article more closely, you discover that only a small portion of the dairy’s

milk is contaminated, and the newspaper lists the serial numbers of the affected containers. When you point out the article to your manager, he tells you to forget it. ‘‘If you think we’ve got time to go through every carton of milk to check serial numbers, you’re crazy,’’ he says. ‘‘The article says right here that the chances are minuscule that anyone has a contaminated carton.’’ He also explains that he doesn’t have the workers to check the milk, and what’s more, destroying the milk would require him to buy emergency milk supplies at the retail price. So he tells you to get back to work and forget about the milk. He says, ‘‘I don’t have the time or the money to worry about such minor details.’’

USE OF CORPORATE RESOURCES ISSUE

You work for Red Company. You and a colleague, Pat Brown, are asked by your manager to attend a weeklong conference in Los Angeles. At least 25 other employees from Red Co. are attending, as well as many customers and competitors from other institutions. At the conference, you attend every session and see many of the Red Co. people, but you never run into Pat. Although you’ve left several phone messages for her, her schedule doesn’t appear to allow room for a meeting. However, when you get back to the office, the department secretary, who is coordinating expense reports, mentions to you that your dinner in L.A. must have been quite the affair. When you ask, ‘‘What dinner?’’ she describes a dinner with 20 customers and Red Co. employees that Pat paid for at a posh L.A. restaurant. When you explain that you didn’t attend, she shows you the expense report with your name listed as one of the attendees.

Thus far, we have discussed business ethics primarily in terms of how individual employees think and respond. But anyone who has ever worked knows that employees are not ‘‘just’’ individuals. They become part of something larger; they’re members of an organizational culture that affects how they think and behave. Here, we apply this culture concept to organizational ethics. You can think about the ethical

culture of an organization as a ‘‘slice’’ of the larger organizational culture that represents the aspects of organizational culture that affect the way employees think and act in ethics-related situations.

In terms of how we’ve been thinking about ethical decision making, you can

consider ethical culture to be a significant organizational influence on individuals’ ethical awareness, judgment, and action, along with the individual differences and

other influences already discussed. Recall that most employees are at

the conventional level of cognitive moral development, meaning that they are looking outside themselves for guidance about how to think and act.