Business Ethics

Business Ethics

Nathan Krichel

Finance 381

I want to take a look at business ethics from a slightly different point of view. From the eyes of a salesperson, lowest in the chain of command within a business. These individuals, no matter how strong their opinion on something or how well their understanding of ethics, have to do what they are told to do. Often times management is confronted with a decision that could go either way ethically, but not many people realize that salespeople are confronted with these decisions as well.

Management has the power to tell his employees what to do, ethical or not. When these decisions that a manager makes are unethical what then is the employee to do? Not follow instructions and get a corrective, or even risk losing a job? This is a tough decision.

Working at an un-named electronics store, I encounter these situations regularly. Fortunately I have the freedom to make my own decisions, but still I answer to a manager. I am in charge of keeping track of the companies cash flows throughout the day. Usually at the end of the night everything counts out within a few dollars variance, an acceptable amount. But every now and then an error will occur. When a couple hundred dollars is missing it isn't a huge deal, usually I can locate it or find out what happened to it, but several thousand dollars is a different story. This is the type of variance that our corporate offices will want to investigate. Nevertheless my manager tells me to "enter the numbers as if the money was there." Not something I wanted to do, but when your boss is in the same room watching you what other choice is there? I'm sure if corporate decided to investigate our store I would be the one held accountable for these errors not my manager. So my dilemma would be, should I report this or just let it slide. A huge ethical decision. If reported the store would surely be under investigation, management would be notified who reported the problem so now I am under close watch by my immediate employers. If not reported it could slide by unnoticed, or it could escalate into an even worse problem. When a lump sum of money is missing, unless resolved, the problems will only compound and escalate into something that I personally wouldn't want to deal with.

I suppose