Ethics in Business

9 Pages 2185 Words

reats that an employee might suffer if they do not follow through with their assignment. After the bogus testing was completed in the Company X labs, the documentation department also had to falsify documents stating that the parts had more than met the governments testing standards. From a legal and ethical standpoint, both the testers and the writers of the reports were merely acting as agents on direct orders from upper management. The writers of the reports were well aware of the situation yet they acted in this manner on the instruction of a supervisor. Acting in an ethical manner becomes a secondary priority in this type of environment. As stated by Alan Reder, “if they (the employees) feel they will suffer retribution, if they report a problem, they aren’t too likely to open their mouths.” (113). The workers knew that if the reports were not falsified they would come under questioning and perhaps their job would be in jeopar!
dy. Although working under these conditions does not fully excuse an employee from moral fault, it does give a starting point to help narrow down the person or department that issued the original request for the unethical acts.
The third mitigating factor is one that perhaps includes the majority of the employees in the Company X case. We have to balance the direct involvement that each employee had with the defective parts. Thus, it has to be made clear that many of the employees did not have direct involvement with the testing departments or with the parts that eventually failed. Even employees, or sub-contractors that were directly involved with the production were not aware of the ignorance on the part of the testing department. For example, the electrical engineer that designed the defective computer chip could have stated that it was tested and it d...