Ethically Dubious Employee Conduct

1. Taking office supplies home for your personal use.

2. Using the telephone for personal, long- distance phone calls.

3. Making personal copies on the office machine.

4. Charging the postage on your personal mail to the company.

5. Making non-business trips in a company car.

6. On a company business trip: staying in the most expensive hotel, taking taxis when you could walk, including wine as food on your expense tab, taking your spouse along at company expense.

7. Using your office computer to shop online, trade stocks, view pornography, or e- mail friends on company time.

8. Calling in sick when you need personal time.

9. Taking half the afternoon off when you’re supposedly on business outside the office.

10. Directing company business to vendors who are friends or relatives.

11. Providing preferential service to corporate customers who have taken you out to lunch.

1. Review each item on Brenda’s list and assess the conduct in question. Do you find it morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or somewhere in between? Explain.

2. Someone might argue that some of the things listed as ethically dubious are really employee entitlements. Assess this contention.

3. How would you respond to the argument that if the company doesn’t do anything to stop the conduct on Brenda’s list, then it has only itself to blame? What about the argument that none of the things on the list is wrong unless the company has an explicit rule against it?

4. What obligations do employees have to their employers? What moral difference, if any, is there between taking something that belongs to an individual and taking something that belongs to a company?