Analysis of Ethical Dilemmas in Business Organizations: A Report

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This essay delves into the pervasive issue of ethical dilemmas within organizations. It begins by highlighting the common occurrence of such dilemmas, emphasizing the challenges in their execution despite established policies and procedures. The essay explores various ethical scenarios, including financial misconduct like accounting scandals, tax evasion, and conflicts of interest within accounting firms. It also touches upon ethical challenges in healthcare, such as decisions regarding abortion, and employee-related dilemmas like taking credit for others' work. The essay discusses the importance of ethical leadership and decision-making, the application of ethical theories such as utilitarianism, deontology, contact ethics, and virtue ethics, and the significance of implementing ethical codes to ensure privacy in the workplace. The essay concludes by stressing the need for organizations to proactively address and resolve ethical dilemmas.
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Running head: BUSINESS ETHICS
Ethical Dilemmas in Organizations
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Author’s Note-
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1BUSINESS ETHICS
Introduction
Ethical dilemma that occurs in an organization are very common and ethical dilemmas
are quite straightforward. The challenge in ethical dilemma is in the execution phase. The
organizations now a days have great policies as well as procedures and implements laws as well
as regulations. But the risk of ethical dilemma is quite high because of unethical behavior in the
organizations (Smebye, Kirkevold & Engedal, 2015). There might be different ethical dilemma
in the organization such as decision making and apply appropriate behavior in the organization.
Ethical dilemma might also include misplaced incentives or misconducting the ethics code.
Different types of ethical issues are explained in the section below followed by a particular
ethical dilemma explained.
There are many organizational misconduct that might raise many ethical issues in an
organization. The ethical scenarios are listed below.
The former CEO of WorldCom was convicted as fraud as well as conspiracy charge for
the accounting scandal in the company for $11billion.
The founder of Adelphia along with his son were accused for looting the wealth of the
company and well as cheating all the investors of billion dollars. Both of them were
abused for bank fraud, conspiracy as well as security fraud.
There are many ethical dilemmas that are involved that occurs in an organization. There
is an ethical dilemma in an accounting firm. The ethical dilemma stated that three partners were
accused for avoiding taxes and using the finds for the parting (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016). The
dilemma came whether accountant of the company included the staffs in accounting system or
not. The tax evasion in the organization was not considered as ethical behavior as because it goes
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2BUSINESS ETHICS
against the rule of conduct and also harms economy of the organization. The dilemma that is
included in the organization includes accountant will change the relationship with directors
(Abel, MacGlashan & Littman, 2016). The accounting firm was capable of solving the dilemma
to adopt proper steps for resolving the matter. The main principles related to the dilemma was
resolved and the principles that were used to solve the dilemma was integrity, professional
behavior, professional competence, as well as objectivity.
There are many ethical dilemma that also arises in the health care centers. The doctor in a
health care unit can come under dilemma about whether to abort a child knowing the life risk of
the patient (Ehrich et al., 2015). The ethical dilemma can be resolved by analyzing the case and
preparing for the decision that is to be taken by the doctor.
Most people in the organizations comes in ethical dilemma consisting of what to do and
what not to. People might come under ethical dilemma about conducting their own business in
their office hours. The employees might even take credit for other’s work and that creates an
ethical dilemma in the organization (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017). The behavior of the senior
employees can also lead to ethical dilemma about knowing higher authority to know about
inappropriate behavior in the working process. Ethical dilemmas mainly includes moral
dilemmas that includes situation to make choice between two or more options in an organization.
Ethical dilemmas often neither resolves any situation from the options chosen in acceptable
fashion. Particularly in those cases, societal as well as ethical guidelines are to be provided that
does not have any satisfactory outcome. The ethical dilemmas mainly assumes that the user will
follow the societal norms that includes religious teachings that makes the choice ethically
impossible. All the ethical issues and the ethical dilemma are very difficult to resolve but the
companies should take initiative steps to resolve the ethical dilemma in the organization.
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3BUSINESS ETHICS
There four types of theories that can be used for ethics in an organization. Utilitarianism,
deontology, contact ethics as well as virtue ethics. In Utilitarianism, there is a combination that
claims valuable consequences as a pleasure and utilitarian allows the units that includes
quantifiable units including pain as well as pleasure (LaRossa & Bennett, 2018). Utilitarianism
includes happiness. Deontology ethics is often considered with an outcome for the action and
deontologists are mainly concerned with nature for the action. The organizations face security
related to technology in the organizations as the employees in an organization can monitor the
technology used by other employees in the organization. The organizations should implement
proper ethical codes to implement privacy in the company device. Virtue of ethics is the third
initiative that is to be taken in the organization. The main problem in the virtue of ethics is that it
seem s to include less information that includes normative ethics.
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References
Abel, D., MacGlashan, J., & Littman, M. L. (2016, March). Reinforcement learning as a
framework for ethical decision making. In Workshops at the Thirtieth AAAI Conference
on Artificial Intelligence.
Ehrich, L. C., Harris, J., Klenowski, V., Smeed, J., & Spina, N. (2015). The centrality of ethical
leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 53(2), 197-214.
Jerolmack, C., & Murphy, A. K. (2017). The ethical dilemmas and social scientific trade-offs of
masking in ethnography. Sociological Methods & Research, 0049124117701483.
LaRossa, R., & Bennett, L. A. (2018). Ethical dilemmas in qualitative family research. In The
psychosocial interior of the family (pp. 139-156). Routledge.
Shapiro, J. P., & Stefkovich, J. A. (2016). Ethical leadership and decision making in education:
Applying theoretical perspectives to complex dilemmas. Routledge.
Smebye, K. L., Kirkevold, M., & Engedal, K. (2015). Ethical dilemmas concerning autonomy
when persons with dementia wish to live at home: a qualitative, hermeneutic study. BMC
health services research, 16(1), 21.
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