Employee Rights in Business Ethics
A1. Employees’ Rights and Responsibilities
Employees have various rights as well as responsibilities to the employers. Firstly, they have the responsibility to carry out the duties assigned to them efficiently by considering the best interest of the employers. An employee is regarded as an agent of a business firm and hence should avoid practices that could harm such a business. Also, employees should protect a business firm’s privacy by not divulging to potential competitors information derived from confidential sources such as profit-and-loss figures and trade secrets (Divya, 2019). Further, employees have the right to protection against hazardous materials in the workplace. According to Divya (2019), employees should be free from harmful chemicals while in the workplace. Safety equipment should be availed to employees while handling toxins and hazardous materials.
A2. Employers’ Ethical Responsibilities
One of the ethical responsibilities of the employers is to develop a working environment that does not discriminate employees based on their social factors such as sex, ethnicity, or race. On this note, equal rewards and compensations should be upheld to all employees. Such enables employees to experience a sense of belonging and hence motivated to contribute their efforts to the realization of the organizational goals. Also, employers have an ethical responsibility to pay the employers their dues in full and on time, as agreed. Violating such an obligation degrades potential trust established between the two parties and hence creating a negative working environment. Importantly to consider, timely payment is a critical motivating factor for the employees to invest their talents and skills in the organization’s operations.
A3. Ethical Business Dilemma
A new employee has joined a sales marketing team for a clothing company. While the young fellow has gone through the orientation process and is determined to deliver his best, it is unfortunate that the senior employees have not embraced him positively. In this regard, the new employee feels uncomfortable, albeit he is hardworking and exhibits elegant talents in his work. Nonetheless, the senior members persistently use unofficial means to complain about his performance to the management.
Accordingly, there has not been any official documentation with complaints regarding his incompetence and unprofessionalism, or gross misconduct. Regardless, the management has kept the new employee on probationary status past the standard five-month period and officially announces it to the entire workgroup, and this impacted his motivation as a team player. In this case, it was unethical for the management to carelessly punish the new employee without prior measures and investigations of the complaints brought forward. Further, the decision violated the work ethics whereby an employee should be cautioned of his behaviors before getting punished.
A4. Ethical Business Dilemma: Evaluation
The theory of relativism upholds that there is no absolute truth; morality and truth rely on the perspectives of culture. The utilitarian approach considers the benefit of the majority of people with the least harm (Harris et al., 2019). In this scenario, a utilitarian employee would assume that he has caused no quantifiable damage to the business or co-workers. Also, the decision made by management would negatively affect him, his family, and his career life. In the relativism approach, senior employees may be discriminative against the young employee, while he may have his standpoints, and hence, neither of the perspectives holds the absolute truth.
A5. Ethical Decisions Employer and employee perspective
Various ethical decisions develop daily in a corporate setting. For instance, company time should not be used for personal matters, such as entertainment. In this regard, watching games and videos by employees is unethical since the focus should be based on enhancing the core mission of the company. Accordingly, this initiates an ethical dilemma of spendthrift of company resources versus personal satisfaction. Additionally, employees should create solid trust with the employee, whereby they can work under minimum supervision. As such, an employer would expect the employee to undertake constructive activities, even when no job tasks have been assigned. While employees have break-times during working hours, they should utilize them for personal issues, although in exhibiting ethical behaviors, they may use such leisure time for corporate tasks.
Another ethical dilemma concerns the use of company property, such as cash out of register or office supplies. If an employee uses such property for personal use, such becomes a morally and ethically corrupt action. Such is because a routine practice of this behavior eventually induces company losses and constraints in making budgets. Also, this behavior violates the ethics that company resources should only be utilized to develop its overall performance.
A6. Ethical Decisions: Explanation
In addressing the first ethical decision in A5, we consider an employee who has a YouTube generating ad revenue; he may justify the personal use of company time for self-development. However, this violates the company code of ethics because although doing constructive work, it does not benefit the employer company. Secondly, if an employee accumulates rent arrears and uses company petty cash to clear them, a colleague would sympathize with the predicament. Nonetheless, individual tussles should not form the basis for violating the ethical values of the company (Monrouxe & Rees, 2017). In any case, the use of company resources only attracts firing or legal actions, regardless of how helpless the employee seems to be at the time of such activities.