The Price of Doing Good: Consequences of Ethical Decision Making

In their day-to-day lives, people encounter a wide range of ethical and moral problems which do not necessarily have straightforward solutions. As a matter of fact, there are ethical dilemmas which present complicated challenges for the decision maker. During ethical dilemmas, there is need to to establish ideal solutions that are firmly rooted in various ethical theories and sound moral judgment. Most of the times, when an ethical dilemma is encountered in an institutional setting, crucial tradeoffs are involved. This is to say that the decision embraced could be taxing on other fronts - but the dilemma will likely or ultimately be solved.

An example of an ethical dilemma is when incompetent staff are employed by the human resource manager as a result of nepotism. In a hypothetical scenario, the human resource manager of bank X is responsible for employing staff based on their qualifications. However, when the employees are further deployed to different bank branches in the institution, it is noted that the staff members lack competence. This would routinely be expected if such persons are employed on nepotism grounds. More specifically, in the said hypothetical scenario, the bank manager from a specific branch notices that sales and performance in the concerned branch are declining at a high rate with the underlying reason for the said occurrences being the sheer incompetence of some members of staff. Hiring decisions should be firmly founded upon qualification and competence. It is important to note that in the present scenario, one of the incompetent staff members is a branch operations manager. He is a nephew to the human resources manager. The position of an operations manager requires the relevant education, experience and certain competencies. The branch manager finds it difficult to work with the operations manager because they are not qualified for the job. He is convinced that they were hired simply because they are related to the HR manager.

The branch manager would want to escalate the matter but he is afraid that he could jeopardize his job and end up jobless. On the other hand, the branch manager faces a lot of challenges every day at work because he is forced to do all the work by himself, since the operations manager has no solutions to offer in as far as various aspects of bank operations are concerned. Although the branch manager is overwhelmed and believes that escalating the matter to the management will help solve the issue, the human resource manager is part of the management and he could deem the branch managers actions as an attempt to challenge...…be deployed. In basic terms, a consequentialist framework essentially focuses on the future effects of possible courses of action. This framework considers the individuals who will be directly and indirectly affected by certain courses of actions (Love, Salinas & Rotman, 2020). The framework considers outcomes that may be desirable in a given situation and the ethical conducts which may result in the best consequences. As has been indicated elsewhere in this text, the best course of action would be expose the hiring practices of the HR manager specifically in relation to the sheer incompetence of the operations manager. The likely consequence in this case would be the firing (or demotion) of the operations manager as well as the HR manager. This would likely result in better hiring decisions and greater competency among employees going forward. The branch manager could also earn a promotion for his diligence. However, the branch manager could be accused of malice and harboring ill-will against the HR manager. He could face the disciplinary committee for this reason and perhaps be edged out of the organization. Thus, this is a decision that could potentially destroy his career. However, given the extent of the problem and the documented impact of poor hiring decisions, reporting the HR directors malpractices would be the best course of action and…