Applying the Ethical Decision-Making Tree Y

You are a manager in a privately held publishing firm. The firm is family owned and your boss is the founder’s son. The company publishes short stories, small novels, and poetry collections from authors whose work would not be published elsewhere. The company has been in business for 20 years. There are 42 employees, and the firm does most of its production work by hand: none of the layouts are put together by a computer. Manuscripts are turned into books through a cut and paste process and the company out sources the distribution of its books to another company. Your boss called you into his office last month and said he wanted to test whether a new computer-based publishing process would reduce the time it takes to publish a book, thereby increasing productivity. He also is considering selling the company to a large publishing firm with its own internal distribution network. You support the idea but are concerned about having to lay off the staff. Nonetheless, you broke the news to the staff and new computers were installed. You immediately reduced your staff by five employees and suspect that more will go if the new equipment increases productivity. To everyone’s surprise however, the new technologically driven publishing process did not reduce the time to publish a book. Rather, the process slowed dramatically. Productivity dropped 40% and employees are complaining. You broke the news to your boss and he simply chalked it up to learning curve. He believes productivity will increase as soon as people become more comfortable with the new system. He also informed you that he wants you to make a presentation next week on the positive results of using this technology to a group people from the company considering buying your organization. He plans to invite his father to the presentation. Knowing that the new technology has reduced productivity, increased costs, and led to employee dissatisfaction and turnover, you are wondering what to do.

1. What would you do?

2. Process a discussion about ethical decision-making. The following questions may be used:

• Did you find it valuable to structure your decision-making around the ethical decision-making tree? Why or why not?

• Based on this experience, why is it hard to evaluate the ethicality of a decision?

• Who ultimately determines whether a decision is ethical?