Ethics Lowes The (In)Formality of Ethics in a Private Organization: A Case Study Lowes Foods Including Recommendations

The recent economic downturn that the world's economies underwent has lead to a period of major reexamination and reconsideration of certain trends in the word of business and finance. The ethical decisions that business organizations must contend with on a daily basis clearly have major ramifications for many partners in its industry and even potentially in the global economy at large depending on the size and positioning of the organization in question. Enough poor ethical decisions can, when added together and mixed with the right conditions can lead to major practical problems in business in addition to being generally reprehensible and directly ruinous to individual consumers and business partners.

Most companies, of course, are not actually of a size to cause complete industry-or economy-wide upheaval due even to their complete failure. That is, most companies are not like Lehman Brothers and will not cause a credit tightening and lack of trust the way the failure of this banking institution -- or the scandals at companies like Enron and Tyco -- did, no matter how large or egregious its ethical violations might be. Regardless, it is important for all business organizations of any size and in all industries to conduct themselves with a high degree of attention to ethical behavior and standards to ensure not only their long-term viability but also a truly positive impact on the industries and communities with which they interact and in which they maintain their day-to-day and ongoing operations.

This paper will examine the method of dealing with ethical issues at one medium-sized organization currently undergoing a major growth spurt. After an analysis of this company's current ethical planning and decision making procedures, a plan for improving its manner of conducting itself in an ethical style so as to improve the efficiency and the efficacy of the organization's ethical processes. Following this, a projected assessment of the...

This will include the possible reactions of employees to the proposed changes in ethical decision-making, which may lead to further recommendations or ongoing methods of analysis to ensure that employees are dealt with in a fair and effective manner throughout all changes.
Ethics at Lowes Foods

Lowes Foods is the owner and operator of approximately one hundred grocery supermarket stores throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, and parts of Virginia (Lowes Foods 2010). A subsidiary of the Alex Lee holding company, Lowes Foods has a fairly simple corporate structure at the company level that becomes far more complex when Alex Lee becomes involves making ethical decision-making a process that is somewhat difficult to trace in a large-scale manner (Lowes Foods 2010; Alex Lee 2010). Though communications channels within the company are highly structured and highly corporatized, the ethical processes and procedures in the company seem informal or at least ill defined (Lowes Food 2010).

Trevino and Nelson (2010) note that in organizations with weaker and/or more fragmented cultures, smaller sub-divisions and departments within that organization are likely to have a much greater impact on ethical decision-making processes and outcomes than will any organization-wide system of values or ethical procedures. Furthermore, while executive have tremendous power as ethical leaders for their business -- when they choose to be ethical, of course -- this requires a great deal of concerted effort especially in highly fragmented organizations (Trevino & Nelson 2010). It would be difficult to describe the organizational structure of Lowes Foods as anything other than highly fragmented, especially within the context of its larger holding company Alex Lee; the fact that the corporation operates more then one hundred retail establishments across three different states and as only a…