Assignment: Ethical Challenges

RESOLVING ETHICAL BUSINESS CHALLENGES *

Lael was just hired by Best East Motels into their manager training program and was excited about the potential benefits after her graduation from Florida State University. Working part-time and going to school full-time was the norm for her, but the Best East job replaced her two part-time jobs. With this new job, she would be the one to assign work times. Her luck continued when she met her mentor Nikhil, who was the son of the owner. Best East Motels was a franchise motel chain in the United States. Owners bought into the chain with a $ 500,000 franchise fee and paid for the construction of the motel. In return for the fee, Best East gave each owner a comprehensive pack- age of marketing, management, accounting, and financial materials to boost motel success rates to over 90 percent. In addition, Best East assisted each owner with groups of people that trained staff for every new job, from housekeeping to accounting. The new-hire training course for each type of employee was developed and based on the best practices within the industry. This particular motel had been in business for ten years and was seen as successful.

As Lael went through the manager train- ing program, everything she heard was great. It sounded like Best East was a career path she would want to pursue long-term. Six months into her job, however, Lael started to hear strange rumors. For example, on the night shift she found there was heavy employee turnover and most were females. Lael began to investigate by scheduling herself onto several night shifts. One night, as she chatted with one of the front desk employees, she discovered the girl planned on quitting. She was seventeen and worked at this Best East motel for a year. “Why are you leaving?” asked Lael.

Her reply startled Lael. “I don’t want trouble, just my last paycheck, a good letter of recommen- dation, and that’s it.”

As Lael pressed her for more information, the seventeen-year-old opened up. She spoke about Nikhil talking suggestively about her to other

employees and how he made suggestive physical gestures when she was around. She told Lael about other female employees treated similarly, and this always occurred during night shifts when Nikhil was on duty.

Digging a little deeper, Lael spoke to sev- eral former employees. Most were fairly young female employees. They told her essentially the same thing. For example, Nikhil would routinely make suggestive comments to female employees. In one incident under Nikhil’s watch, some male employees flirted with female employees, includ- ing undocumented workers. Nikhil reportedly sat there with a smile. They also told her Nikhil allowed customers at the motel to offer their room keys to female employees.

After a few weeks, Lael heard the same story from younger female employees and even some of the maids. Their responses to these situations were similar. They ranged from “Nikhil told me if I was older he would ask me out” to “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this because it might appear I’m a tattle tale.” Another common excuse for not reporting was that Nikhil assured them this was part of the motel business and was normal. Most employees were afraid to report on the boss’s son and put their jobs on the line.

Lael reviewed the section of the franchise employee handbook. It clearly stated sexual harassment of any kind would not be tolerated and should be reported immediately to the proper manager. Lael could tell from the manual the alle- gations against Nikhil constituted sexual harass- ment. While the Best East Franchise Corporation had no ethics hotline, Lael thought this could be a legal issue.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

• The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CLASS

Discussion Questions (DQ)

• Initial responses to the DQ should address all components of the questions asked, include a minimum of one scholarly source, and be at least 250 words.
• Successful responses are substantive (i.e., add something new to the discussion, engage others in the discussion, well-developed idea) and include at least one scholarly source.
• One or two sentence responses, simple statements of agreement or “good post,” and responses that are off-topic will not count as substantive. Substantive responses should be at least 150 words.
• I encourage you to incorporate the readings from the week (as applicable) into your responses.

Weekly Participation

• Your initial responses to the mandatory DQ do not count toward participation and are graded separately.
• In addition to the DQ responses, you must post at least one reply to peers (or me) on three separate days, for a total of three replies.
• Participation posts do not require a scholarly source/citation (unless you cite someone else’s work).
• Part of your weekly participation includes viewing the weekly announcement and attesting to watching it in the comments. These announcements are made to ensure you understand everything that is due during the week.

APA Format and Writing Quality

• Familiarize yourself with APA format and practice using it correctly. It is used for most writing assignments for your degree. Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for APA paper templates, citation examples, tips, etc. Points will be deducted for poor use of APA format or absence of APA format (if required).
• Cite all sources of information! When in doubt, cite the source. Paraphrasing also requires a citation.
• I highly recommend using the APA Publication Manual, 6th edition.

Use of Direct Quotes

• I discourage overutilization of direct quotes in DQs and assignments at the Masters’ level and deduct points accordingly.
• As Masters’ level students, it is important that you be able to critically analyze and interpret information from journal articles and other resources. Simply restating someone else’s words does not demonstrate an understanding of the content or critical analysis of the content.
• It is best to paraphrase content and cite your source.

LopesWrite Policy

• For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.
• Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.
• Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?
• Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.

Late Policy

• The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.
• Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.
• If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.
• I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.
• As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.

Communication

• Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:
• Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.
• Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.