Ethical Management in Fictitious Company

Ethical Management in Fictitious Company

NatHealth Nutrition Inc. is a commercial organization that provides comprehensive food services to businesses and other organizations. It offers menus of healthful and nutritious meals as a better option to standard food service fare typically offered in institutional settings such as schools, colleges, businesses, and other entities that serve food to students and employees. The mission of NatHealth Nutrition Inc. is to support improvements in national health by improving the regular diet of as many people as possible. It is the commercial food vendor analogue to the Whole Foods retail sales concept.

In addition to directly improving national health through better nutrition, the organization is also dedicated to contributing positively to the growth of preventative health care in general. In that regard, NatHealth Inc. actively supports initiatives to increase disease screening programs, smoking cessation programs, recreational exercise programs, and is involved in numerous other campaigns to increase awareness of preventative health issues and to provide greater access to healthful nutrition and other services to lower income communities.

The organization maintains very high standards of ethics that go beyond the requirements of law in the workplace. It prohibits various types of discrimination beyond what is required by federal and state law in connection with which it recognizes rights such as health insurance for cohabitating significant others and recognition of same-sex unions in employee benefits even without any formal (i.e. legal) recognition of same-sex marriages in the state where it is incorporated and does business.

Ethical Focus in Recruitment:

In the recruitment phase, NatHealth Inc. relies more on passive communication efforts (Locker, 2006) than on specifically selecting for ethically superior new hires. This is mainly because Human Resource executives recognize that prospective job applicants undergoing the interview process can be naturally expected to mirror whatever values and attitudes are modelled by the recruiter and the organization (Myers & Spencer, 2004). On the other hand, the recruiter does emphasize the organizational values and commitment to high ethical principles in a manner that accurately represents the organizational expectations of all employees throughout its recruitment brochures and related printed matter.

Ethics in Training:

Once new hires join the organization, NatHealth Inc. provides extensive new-hire training in ethics. That process includes standard ethical training in compliance with legal requirements, definitions, and standards; following that, NatHealth Inc. continues with sensitivity training and ethics-in-the-workplace seminars covering additional elements of organizational values and ethical policies. Those materials and presentations cover everything from cultural sensitivity and establishing positive working group dynamics to understanding discrimination and avoiding harassment scenarios in every conceivable context.

The company also distributes written versions of organizational values and expectations in ethical matters in the employee handbook materials and all NatHealth Inc. employees must fulfil annual ethics training in conjunction with which they must complete an annual online certification test conducted on each employee's computer terminal.

Ethics in Supervision and Administration:

In addition to regular organization-wide annual employee ethics training, managers and other employees with supervisory responsibilities must participate in additional ethics training that addresses additional ethical issues and circumstances capable of arising in the context of supervisory relationships in the workplace. In that regard, NatHealth Inc. managers and supervisors are trained to recognize potential ethical conflicts as early as possible, to analyze possible course of action, and to take decisive action by implementing the best possible ethical decisions and corresponding solutions that are the most consistent with organizational ethical values and principles.

In addition, all NatHealth Inc. managers attend a week-long mandatory training retreat every September at which they attend strategic meetings and receive training in several different aspects of their operational responsibilities. Two days are reserved for ethics-specific discussions, policy reviews, and updated training in the full range of ethical issues in the workplace. Subsequent to their return, individual managers conduct an ethics policy review session with their direct reports at which time they provide supplemental ethical instructions to update all employees with respect to any changes in organizational ethics policies and expectations.

Monitoring:

While the organization does maintain scrupulous and detailed personnel files, ethical issues are addressed proactively in a manner intended to immediately rectify all identified ethical problems rather than primarily through documentation. In fact, one of the principal reasons that NatHealth Inc. does not issue employment contracts is precisely because the organization chooses to retain as much independent autonomous authority to terminate employees as allowed by law (Halbert & Ingulli, 2007). All employees are hired as at-will employees and without employment contracts of any kind. This allows the organization to take a so-called "zero-tolerance" approach to specific kinds of ethical transgressions that would necessitate much more protracted types of remedial responses in different types of employment relationships (Halbert & Ingulli, 2007).