Embellished Resume

You
are the ethics officer at Friendly Digits, a respected and profitable social
media company in Colossal Corporation’s technology group. Friday morning, you arrive at your office to
find you’ve received a voicemail from Ernst Blofeld. Blofeld has been a vice president at Friendly
Digits for several years, and was recently considered for promotion to a senior
vice president position. Ultimately, the
promotion was awarded to another long term employee, Tara King. You find it difficult to make out some of
Blofeld’s message. The words are
occasionally slurred, as though he may have had a little too much to drink. I’m in Palm Springs for a conference, he
explains, and I ran into a nice couple here at the hotel bar. You’d never believe it, but they’re old
friends of Tara’s from school. I told
them about her promotion, and they said she never finished her degree. She dropped out of the MBA program they all
attended, and they never saw her again. You
have to get to HR to check this out for me.

You
check Friendly Digits policy manual, which states that potential employees must
submit transcripts for all degrees listed on their resumes. But this requirement was not in place 10 years
ago when Tara King was hired. King has
received excellent performance evaluations during her time at Friendly Digits,
and her leadership has led to increased revenue and positive press for the
company. Her record of success is what
led to her promotion. After a brief consultation with Mindy Wu, the director of
human resources, you telephone King. Based
on current HR policy, we’re asking all employees who don’t have official
transcripts on file, to submit them to the human resources department. There is a silence at King’s end, then in a
shaky voice, she tells you that she does not in fact have an MBA. I was 12 credits away from completing my
degree, she says, but then my dad got sick and I had to drop out. I really needed a job to support my family. I put the MBA on my resume because I hoped it
would help me get hired. I always
intended to go back to school, but I never did. It was a really stressful time.

You
tell King that you need a little time to think about the situation. You promise to call her back as soon as
possible. You know that an MBA was not a
requirement for the assistant project specialist job King was hired for 10
years ago. But four years ago, it was
made a requirement for the senior vice president position she holds now. Two of the current senior vice presidents do
not have MBA degrees, because they were promoted before this requirement was in
place. Mindy Wu has asked you to write a memo with your recommendations on how
human resources should handle this issue. King has a record of excellence with Friendly
Digits, and her superiors would be unhappy to lose her.

If your memo addresses the Badaracco
Framework and the legal issues, remember the Badaracco framework is intended to
be used to analyze a certain kind of problem, specifically a “right versus
right” problem.

Identify the stakeholders and determine
whether some are more important than others.

Determine whether all stakeholders have
been consulted on the business decision at hand.

Describe the possible actions of the
stakeholders following the business decision.

In addition you are applying the ethical
tests below to evaluate possible business decisions in light of the following
ethical tests to identify the best possible decision:

Rights, Justice and fairness, virtues,
common good, and utilitarian

Identify the best possible decision and
justify your choice with reference to the ethical approach on which you have
based it. Sufficiently utilize some of
these theories to analyze the situation and come to a conclusion.

Before beginning the memo you should
review the four questions and three tests of the Badaracco’s right v. right
framework in detail. You are required to analyze the scenario by specifically
addressing both Badaracco’s four questions and his three tests.

The four questions are:

Which way of proceeding is going to
achieve the best net-net consequences?

Whose rights must be respected?

What messages will this decision send
about the ideals and principles I/we stand for?

What will work in the world as it
is?

The 3 tests are:

The newspaper test:

Ask yourself what plan of action for
dealing with the problem in front of you is going to work best if it’s going to
appear of the front page of your local paper—let’s say, tomorrow. That’s a way of picking up on all the
consequences of your act, and it’s a way of looking at things in this kind of
pragmatic, Machiavellian, what’s-really-going-to-work sense.

The golden rule (or its variations) test:

To walk a mile in the other person’s
shoes. That’s a way of picking up on
other people’s rights that you may be overlooking, because you’re the
decision-maker, you’re in a position of authority and you’re under pressure to
get a decision done. And the final
question has different versions.

The best friend test:

Ask yourself how you would like somebody
who knows you well, whose respect matters to you, to look at you a few years
down the road, and think about how you made the decision. That’s a way of
really putting a spotlight on the character issues—your character, the
character of the organization you’re trying to shape.

You must apply Badaracco’s framework to
some or all of the following situations:

Terminating King from her position;

Allowing King to keep the promotion
(likely with some stipulation of completing here MBA);

Demoting King, but allowing her to keep
some employment

Make sure that your discussion uses all
4 questions and all 3 tests together. These questions balance each other
and all have to be used together in order to arrive at a sound decision. As you
work through the Badaracco questions and tests, articulate assumptions
regarding potentially important points not explicitly defined in the scenario.
After identifying the best possible decision you must justify your choice with
reference to the ethical approach on which you have based it and come to a
conclusion.

Your task is to communicate your
findings to the vice president via memo. To be complete there must be a clearly
stated, reasonably supported recommendation somewhere in the memo. As Badaracco
notes, “the payoff question is, what do we do?”

Exhibit the capacity to identify the
legal issues

Exhibit the capacity to research and
evaluate legal issues, draw conclusions and provide recommendations

In addition to ensuring that the
substance of your responses to the three questions is accurate.

To convey your message effectively your
written memorandum should be concise, well organized, grammatically correct,
effective and persuasive and demonstrate superior facility with the conventions
of standard written English.

Step
1: Ethical Analysis

The ethical aspects of King’s situation
seem complex, and you realize that you need a structured way to think through
the various possibilities and their implications. You know that there are many
different schools of ethical thought and a variety of frameworks or approaches
for analyzing ethical problems, but you decide that the best approach to this
particular situation is Badaracco’s Right vs. Right Framework.

Work through the Badaracco ethical
analysis, considering the various options for action and the winners and losers
for each option. What are your recommendations for the best ethical course of
action?

When you’ve finished analyzing the
ethical aspects of this case, continue to the next step, in which you’ll
consider any legal issues that could affect your decisions.

Step
2: Legal Analysis

In addition to the ethical aspects of
King’s situation, there may be legal implications that the human resources
department needs to account for before moving forward with any plan of action.
You realize that you need to review any relevant information about fraud that
might affect what could or should be done about King, including employment at
will.

Now that you’ve worked through possible
legal implications and arrived at a recommended course of action for Friendly
Digits’ HR department, it’s time to present your analysis, recommendations, and
action plan in a memo to Mindy Wu, the director of HR.

Using the Badaracco framework and your
legal analysis, prepare a memo for HR.

SAMPLE MEMORANDUM FORMAT

To: Mindy Wu, Director of HR

cc: Head of Departments

From: Ethics Officer, Friendly Digits

Date: 11/02/2017

Subject: Embellished Resume

You must also include APA-formatted
in-text citations and an APA-formatted reference list (do not format the body
of the memo using APA style, just the reference list). See references and
citations for details.

Include a specific recommendation on
what actions, if any, HR should take based on your analysis and conclusions.

The memo should be no more than 10 pages
(double spaced, 12-point font; the reference list does not count towards page
limit).

Title your file using this protocol:
yourlastname_King_date.