Envisioning An Ideal Organization, The Responsibilities Of Leadership
Due: Thu Nov 9, 2017Worth: 20% of final grade, scaled out of 20
Objective: Envision an ideally ethical organization, and articulate a responsible, pragmatic action plan for implementing that vision.
Topic: Write a paper that responds to the questions: (1) What would an ethical organization look like? (2) How can concepts and examples from the Ethical Organizations Unit be applied to the creation of an ethical organization? (3) What are the responsibilities of the leadership in creating an ethical organization?
Assignment: Your paper should perform the following tasks:
(1) Depict an ethical organization: Imagine an ideally ethical organization, starting with a description of your role in that organization. What kind of organization is it (business, non-profit, academic…)? What kind of products / services does it provide? Are you the entrepreneur, manager, executive, or do you have some other role? Does the organization have a mission statement and set of core values? What is its authority structure? Is it privately owned or publicly traded? What institutional policies, procedures, and practices are in place to promote ethics? Is it a socially responsible company?(2) Explain relevant textual concepts and examples: Identify a set of concepts and examples from this unit that are relevant to your vision. Explain the concepts in depth and show how they relate to components (1) and (3). Select examples of either ethical or unethical institutional practices and then explain what lessons you derive from those practices as they pertain to components (1) or (3). Elaborate, expand, or innovate.(3) Articulate and justify the responsibilities of leadership: Articulate your view of leadership and specify the types of leadership roles that exist in your ideal organization. Then, clarify the responsibilities of the leadership and explain why the leadership needs to adopt these responsibilities. Your argument will need to apply a theory (or theories) from the Theoretical Framework unit.
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Envisioning an Ideal Organization
Ethics is concerned with a person’s moral judgments regarding wrong and right. It is of great importance for an ideal organization (Dalla 34). This paper discusses what an ethical organization would look like and how examples and concepts covered in class could be applied to the creation of an ethical organization. In addition, the responsibilities of leadership in creating an ethical organization are described
Depiction of an Ethical Organization
The ideally ethical organization is a clothing and footwear company. The firm engages in designing, developing, marketing and selling athletic apparel and footwear for both men and men. It carries out its operations in the United States and is planning to expand to Europe and Asia starting 2018. This is a publicly-traded, for-profit corporation with its headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. The company provides various categories of athletic apparel and footwear, including those for soccer, baseball, training, basketball, running, tennis, golf, wrestling and outdoor activities. It also offers products that are designed for children aged 4 years to 15 years. My role in this organization is that I am a middle-level manager. I report to the top executives.
The mission statement of the company is as follows: to be a leader in the athletic goods with products designed with a passion for a sporting lifestyle and for sports activities. In this regard, the firm focuses on bringing the most innovative and best sportswear to consumers. The company is consumer-focused and thus it continuously strives to improve the image, feel, look and quality of its products in order to match or go beyond the expectations of customers and to offer them the highest value. The company uses functional organizational structure. It has different portions and each of them is grouped in accordance with its purpose. There are a production department, a sales department, a human resources department, and a marketing department.
The company has in place institutional policies aimed at promoting ethics. In particular, there is a Code of Ethics and a Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct specifies that supplier factories which make products for the company have to satisfy a stringent set of compliance requirements. The Code of Conduct comprises standards pertaining to safety, health, freedom of association, wages, and hiring practices. The company often reviews supplier factories for the purpose of assessing their capacity to satisfy the company’s high standards. The Code of Ethics is for every company employee and it outlines standards of conduct that the company expects every employee to follow. It includes various topics on use of resources, competition, legal compliance, product safety, and ethical behavior. Moreover, the firm has a corporate culture that emphasizes ethical conduct. Everybody in the organization is held accountable for ethical behavior. The firm is socially responsible. Every year, it donates 2.5% of its profits to local charity organizations. Other than philanthropy, the firm encourages its employees to volunteer their time in support of certain community organizations.
Explanation of Relevant Textual Concepts and Examples
There are a few examples and concepts from the Ethical Organizations, Units that can be applied in different ways to the creation of an ethical organization. Hoyk and Hersey (4) described many traps that people often succumb to, which are considered as the fundamental causes of unethical behavior. The primary traps, mainly comprise external stimuli and are the key traps which prompt people to make particular decisions with no regard for ethical standards and principles (Hoyk and Hersey 12). One specific example is the obedience to authority trap. This starts from people’s formative childhood years as they are instructed to obey their parents all the time, then are taught to always obey their teachers in school. If a person is instructed by his/her supervisor or boss to perform an unethical act, the forceful need to abide by the authority serves such a commanding external stimulus that the person would most probably do as ordered without being aware of its opposition to her/his own ethical principles (Hoyk and Hersey 16). It is of note that sometimes the subordinate staff may realize that the order given to him/her by the boss is not ethical, but the impulse to be obedient is so strong that it supersedes his/her decision making.
There are also personality traps. These are chiefly comprised of internal stimuli in the form of different personality traits which could make individuals to become more vulnerable and susceptible to transgression. One example is the need for closure trap. According to Hoyk and Hersey (23), this type of personality trap manifests itself in the longing for an exa...