Essay Case:

Marsha is a recent hire at a small company XYZ Enterprises, Inc. and she is working on the design of a new ground fault interrupt device (GFI) specifically designed for RV trailers. She is working Tom who is a senior product development engineer and he has been with the company for 20 years and is Marsha's supervisor.

Marsha has recently made a breakthrough in her sensor technology which is based on capacitive coupling in place of the traditional inductive coupling to the hot and neutral wires. Her design monitors the voltage drop along a short length of each wire to monitor the current flow through that section of the wire. This design results in a 10% decrease in the product cost, and decreased response time, and a direct path for implementing a zeroing technique to calibrate each GFI device for the specific systems connected to it.

This is essential for some common devices in RV's which have small current flows allowed to the ground in their design. Marsha's cursory patent search suggests this is a patentable idea.

Tom and Marsha have been testing the new design for the past two years under various conditions,leading to several re-designs. Tom has displayed meticulous data collection and analysis skills which Marsha has come to admire. Over that time Marsha discovered that health issues with Tom's son has caused significant financial strain on his family, and that Tom has indicated that XYZ Enterprises, Inc. is not doing well. Their competition is beginning to corner the market, and he fears he will lose his job and will not be able to pay for the essential medical treatments for his son. They are convinced that this new GFI system will give XYZ Enterprises, Inc. an edge in the market.

The owner of XYZ Enterprises, Inc. has increased the pressure on the team to bring the product to market,and streamline the development process. To accomplish this, Tom assigns Marsha to testing of the GFI system under low humidity conditions (high temperatures and low temperatures), while he investigates the high humidity conditions (high temperatures and low temperatures). Early one morning, Marsha arrives early to work and finds Tom's office remained unlocked from the night before. She entered his office to see if he was there, and notices a plot of data on his desk that suggest the GFI failed a test under the high humidity, high temperature conditions. After Tom arrives, she problems him about the failure.

Tom indicates that he was aware of that failure; however it was not a valid experiment as the power to the lab was lost during data collection and was therefore not reliable (Marsha wondered how the data were collected at all, if there was a power failure in the lab). In addition, he states that this was not the only test under these conditions, and that all other tests passed. Tom instructs Marsha that it would not be appropriate to use faulty data in their analysis, and that she should not bring this up in future meetings with the CEO. Marsha investigates with other colleagues to find that the test in problem resulted in a small fire in the lab, and that Tom only did three additional tests under those conditions while they typically do ten. Her colleagues were not concerned and reiterated that Tom is very careful in his data collection.

The next day in a presentation to the CEO, Tom recognized Marsha's accomplishments and showed that the new design passed all tests with 100% success. He did not mention the fewer number of tests, nor did he mention the one failure to the CEO.

Your Assignment:

After an introductory description of traditional GFI technology, include advantages and disadvantages associated with traditional GFI technology. Describe what options Marsha has to proceed. Identify the moral issues involved, and the ethical dilemmas if any with each option. Is there any additional information needed?