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- 1. Chapter 8: Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing
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Chapter 8
Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing
Workers
Chapter Overview
Chapter 8 "Manager’s Ethics: Getting, Promoting, and Firing
Workers" examines some ethical decisions
facing managers. It considers the values that underlie and guide
the hiring, promoting, and firing of
- 2. workers.
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8.1 Hiring
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Locate ethical tensions affecting the breadth of a hiring
search.
2. Define applicant screening and mark its ethical boundaries.
3. Define applicant testing and consider what makes an
appropriate test.
4. Draw the lines of an ethical interview process.
Help Wanted, but from Whom?
The Central Intelligence Agency’s hiring practices are widely
known and well depicted in the movie The
Recruit. After discretely scouting the special capabilities of a
young bartender played by Colin Ferrell, Al
Pacino catches him at work, orders a drink, carries on a one-
sided and cryptic conversation, performs a
magic trick with a ripped newspaper, announces that “things are
never quite as they appear,” and finally
- 3. admits that he’s actually a job recruiter.
Ferrell seems annoyed by the man’s presence.
Pacino returns to the newspaper, pulls out a page covered by an
ad announcing “Two Day Specials.” He
circles the letters c, i, and a in “Specials” and walks out. Colin
Ferrell follows.
[1]
Actually, that’s not true. The CIA doesn’t hire that way. They
advertise on CareerBuilder just like any
other company. You can understand, though, why they wouldn’t
mind scouting out their applicants even
before allowing people to apply; they don’t want to end up
hiring double agents.
Something like that happened soon after Procter & Gamble grew
jealous of a competitor’s hair-care
products. Salon Selective, Finesse, and Thermasilk were all
doing so well for Unilever that P&G contracted
people to get hired over at Unilever and bring back secrets of
their success. The corporate espionage—
which P&G executives characterized as a “rogue operation”—
led to a multimillion-dollar settlement
between the companies and left behind the lesson that when
you’re the boss and you’re hiring, you’ve got
- 4. to make sure that the people you bring in will be loyal to the
company.
[2]
The problem is you’ve also got to make sure that they’re going
to do good work, the best work possible.
Between the two requirements there’s a tension stretching
through every decision to hire a new worker.
On one side, you want to limit the people you even consider to
those few who, for one reason or another,
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you know won’t be a total disaster. On the other side, no
company can survive playing it safe all the time;
generally, the corporations able to hire the best talent will win
over the long run. And one way to get the
best talent is to cast as large a net as possible, let a maximum
number know that a position is available,
and work through the applications carefully no matter how
many pour in.
Conclusion. Hiring employees can be safe or risky depending on
how broadly you announce a job opening.
Three Strategies for Announcing a Job Opening: Nepotism,
Internal Public
- 5. Announcement, Mass Public Announcement
Start on the safe side of hiring. Nepotism is granting favored
status to family members. In the case of
hiring, it means circulating information about open jobs only to
your relatives. Naturally this happens at
many small businesses. A sales representative at a small firm
importing auto accessories meets a woman
at work. She’s also a rep. Marriage follows. A year later he
decides to quit his job and strike out on his own
with a new website project that reviews and sells the same kind
of car products. Things go well, page hits
climb, sales increase, and soon he needs help so he hires…his
wife. They’ve worked together before, and
they both know the field. Most important, the risk is minimal.
Since he’s waking up with her in the
morning he can figure she’s not going to skip out on work just
because it’s a nice spring day. And is she
going to steal office supplies? A little money from the payroll?
An important client? Probably not. This is a
case where nepotism makes sense.
But what about the other way? What if the husband’s solo
venture flops, and at the same time, his wife’s
career flourishes. Now he needs a job, and she’s got the power
- 6. to hire. A job opens up. Probably, she’s got
junior staff ready for the post, but can she push them aside and
bring her husband in?
There is some justification: she’s worked with him before, and
she knows he performs well. Plus, as a boss
of his own (failed) business, he’s obviously got leadership
experience and he has demonstrated initiative.
All that counts for something. But if she goes with him she’s
going to breed resentment in her group. You
can hear it:
“Hey, what do you need to get a promotion around here?”
“A last name.”
And
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Now you might be asking why nepotism bugs me so much. It’s
the presumption. It’s the attitude.
It’s just one more example of how life isn’t fair. Am I jealous? I
don’t know. I guess I take
advantage of the company in other ways…LOL. What can I
learn from this? That life is good if
- 7. you’re born into the right family? That I need to control my
attitude and stop letting petty crap
drive me to drink?
[3]
That last paragraph comes from a blog entry titled “Nepotism
Sucks.” It does for his company too: few
firms can be successful with employees musing about how they
“take advantage of the company” while
they’re punctuating comments about their work with LOL. As
for the central issue, he’s right. Basic
fairness isn’t being honored: people are getting considered for a
job because of who they’re related to, and
it’s not this blogger’s fault that his last name is wrong.
On the other hand, “Is Nepotism So Bad?” titles an article on
Forbes.com that compiles a list of large
companies—including Forbes—where nepotism has been the
norm…and successful. According to the
article, experts estimate that executive-level nepotism works out
about 40 percent of the time. What are
the advantages to bringing in your own? Familiarity with the
business and trust are noted. Another
advantage is also underlined: frequently, relatives don’t want to
let their own relatives down. Sons work
- 8. harder for fathers, cousins for cousins, brothers for sisters.
There’s a productivity advantage in nepotism.
Arguably, that factor weighs more heavily than the bitterness
arising when deserving workers already
employed don’t get a chance to apply for a job because it
already went to the boss’s sister-in-law.
[4]
Finally, at least theoretically, there’s a creative solution to the
bitterness caused by nepotism: make
virtually every post a nepotism-first position. Oil-Dri, a
producer of absorbent materials, celebrated its
fiftieth anniversary with a party for all employees. “Would
everyone,” the group was asked at one point,
“who is related to someone else in the company please stand
up?” Of the seven hundred employees, about
five hundred left their seats.
Internal public job announcements occupy a middle spot on the
continuum between playing it safe (only
letting selected people you’re certain will be loyal and at least
moderately capable know when a job is
available) and going for the best talent (broadcasting the post as
broadly as possible and accepting
applications from anyone).
- 9. An example of an internal public job announcement comes from
the National Review, a political
magazine and website run by the kind of people who wear suits
and ties to baseball games. Their blog is
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called The Corner, and the magazine’s editors fill it with
thoughts and arguments about the day’s political
debates in Washington, DC. There’s also a bit of insider humor,
provocation, and satire tossed back and
forth between posters. If you keep reading for a few weeks,
you’ll start to sense an intellectual soap opera
developing along with the libertarian-conservative politics;
there’s an undercurrent of shifting alliances,
snarkiness, and thoughtful jabs.
You’ll also notice that National Review places job
announcements on The Corner blog. There aren’t a lot
of openings, but every couple of weeks a little announcement
appears between posts.
The National Review Online is seeking an editor with web
capabilities. Send applications to
[email protected]
It’s pretty ingenious. The only people who are going to be
- 10. reading The Corner are
publish about;
announcement, they’re not looking for a job
at all because it’s not a job site);
crew. The posters let personalities shine
through, and if you don’t have chemistry with their style of
humor and talk, you’re simply not going to be
reading them.
What an internal public job announcement seeks to do is get the
most applications in the hopper as
possible, and so the announcement is published on a free
Internet page that anyone can see. That’s the
public part. But because the page is only commonly followed by
people who are already inside the world
of public policy defining the employees at National Review, the
bosses don’t need to worry about the
wrong kind of people sending in résumés. That’s the “internal”
part. Recruiters can get a lot of
applicants—increasing their chances of finding really talented
people—without worrying too much about a
- 11. bunch of lefties who really prefer websites like Daily Kos
trying to fake their way into the organization.
Mass public job announcements are just what they sound like.
You need someone and you post the
position at Monster, CareerBuilder, and The Ladders. Here
you’re giving up confidence that applicants
will fit into the organization naturally, and you’re even risking
corporate spying moles like those that
infested Unilever. In exchange, however, you’re getting the
broadest selection possible of people to toss
their hat into the ring, which maximizes your chances of finding
stellar work performance.
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Beyond the advantage of many applicants, there are good ethical
arguments for mass public job
announcements. The simplest is fair play: everyone should get
an equal opportunity to take a run at any
job. Just past that, there are concerns about discrimination that
are eased by mass announcements. While
there’s no reason to launch charges of inherent racism at
nepotistic hiring practices, it might well be true
that if a small business is initiated by an Asian family, and they
- 12. start hiring relatives, the result at the end
of the day is a racial imbalance in the company. Again, no one
is equating nepotism with racism, but the
appearance can develop fairly easily whenever job
announcements are not publicized as widely as
possible. The parallel case can be made with respect to internal
public job announcements. If 90 percent
of the people who come in contact with the “help wanted”
message happen to be women, sooner or later,
there’s going to be some guy out there who complains. So, one
argument in favor of mass announcements
is the stand it helps take against illegal and unethical
discrimination.
Another argument for mass announcements is reciprocity. If a
company is trying to sell a product to the
general public, to anyone who’s willing to pay money for it,
then shouldn’t they allow everyone a shot at
becoming an employee? It doesn’t seem quite right to profit
from anyone—to try to sell, say, a car to
anyone who walks in the door—and then turn around and not
give all those consumers a decent chance at
earning a living there at the dealership.
Conclusion. Announcing a job opening is not automatic. You
can announce the spot more publicly or less
- 13. so. There are advantages and disadvantages to the various
approaches, but there’s always an ethical
responsibility to clearly account for the reasons why one
approach is selected over another.
Ethical Perils of Job Announcements
Ethical perils of job announcements include
1. describing a position in ways that don’t correspond with the
reality,
2. announcing a post to people who really have no chance for
the job.
Once you’ve identified the demographic pool you’d like to
recruit from, it’s easy to oversell the job in the
announcement you post. The most blatant cases—You can earn
$300 per hour working from home!—are
obvious frauds, but even sincere attempts can cause
misunderstandings. Say a job requires “occasional
travel.” Fine, but does that mean occasionally during the year or
occasionally during the month?
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The much more severe case of insincerity in job announcements
is posting one before an audience that
- 14. has no reasonable chance of getting the job. When Hooters posts
a “server wanted” sign, we all know what
they’re looking for just like when the rough bar next door
advertises for a bouncer. But what if it’s a formal
restaurant advertising for a waiter? If the place is across town,
you can’t just drop in to check out the kind
of people they hire. So maybe you go through the application
process and make the telephone calls and
finally go in for the interview. As you walk through the door,
the first thing they check out is your weight
profile. Then your jaw line, haircut, eyes, and the rest. They
want to see how you compare with the other
waiters who all look like they model on the side.
If you’re lucky, you see yourself fitting right in, but if you’re
like most of us, you know the interview’s over
before it started; the whole thing has been a huge waste of time.
Now put yourself on the other side. As the restaurant manager
trying to fill the position, you know
you should put the requirement that applicants be devastatingly
handsome into the ad. The duty to be
honest requires it. The duty to treat others as an end and not a
means requires it. The idea that our acts
should be guided by the imperative to bring the greatest good to
- 15. the greatest number requires it. Almost
every mainstream ethical theory recommends that you tell the
truth about what you’re looking for when
you announce a job. That way you don’t waste peoples’ time,
and you spare them the humiliation of being
treated as irrelevant. So you should want to put in the ad
something about how only potential movie stars
need apply.
But the law virtually requires that you don’t put the line in. If
you explicitly say you’ll only consider
exceptionally attractive men for your job, you open yourself to
a slew of lawsuits for unfair and
discriminatory hiring practices. In fact, even Hooters aren’t
safe. In 2009 the chain was sued by a Texas
man named Nikolai Grushevski because they refused to hire
servers who looked, well, like him. When it
gets to that point—when hairy guys can get away with calling
lawyers because they aren’t hired to serve
food in short shorts and halter tops—you can understand why
restaurants don’t want to publicly admit
exactly what they’re looking for.
[5]
Bottom line: if Hooters just comes out and states what it is that
- 16. makes their kind of employee, they can get
sued. So they’re much better off just making the announcement
ambiguous. That way, when it turns out
that no hairy guys ever seem to get hired, they can always say
it’s because they didn’t seem so adept at
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dodging tables while shooting around with trays of beers and
sandwiches. Or whatever. One lie is as good
as another so long as it keeps the restaurant out of the
courtroom.
For managers, this is a tight spot. They’re caught between
what’s right and the law. In ethical terms,
they’re stretched between two conflicting duties: to tell the
truth and to get the famous Hooters Girls into
the restaurant.
Screening
Reducing a large pool of applicants to a manageable selection
of people for serious consideration
is applicant screening, sometimes referred to as filtering.
Screening begins with the job announcement.
Requirements like “three or more years of experience” and
- 17. “willingness to work the night shift” go a long
way toward eliminating applicants.
It’s impossible, though, to completely define the perfect
applicant beforehand, and even if you could,
there’s almost always going to be someone like Nikolai
Grushevski who shows up. So screening continues
as the preliminary review of applications and applicants to see
who can be quickly crossed off the list
without any serious consideration.
Legally, who can be crossed out? The default response is no
one. In its broadest form, civil rights
employment law guarantees equal opportunity. All applicants
deserve to be considered and
evaluated solely on their ability to do the job, and the federal
government’s Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission is stocked with lawyers who are out
there doing their best to make sure the rules
are upheld. For managers, that means they’ve got to take all
applicants seriously; they’ve got to pursue
interview questions about ability, training, experience, and
similar. Now, this is where a guy like
Grushevski can come in the door and say, “Look, I can deliver a
round of burgers and beer as well as any
- 18. woman.” He’s probably right. Still, he’s not the right person for
the job; there’s no reason for a manager to
lose valuable time dealing with him.
Similarly, a wheelchair-bound man shouldn’t be a beach
lifeguard; an eighty-year-old shouldn’t be flying
commercial jetliners; the seven foot one and 330-pound
Shaquille O’Neil isn’t going to be a horse jockey.
There is a legal way for companies to summarily screen out
inappropriate applicants: by appealing
tobona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs). BFOQs are
exceptions granted to equal opportunity
requirements. A form of legalized discrimination, they let
managers cross off job applicants for reasons
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that are normally considered unfair: gender, physical size,
religious belief, and similar. (As a note, race
isn’t allowed to be considered a BFOQ.)
When do bosses get this easy way out? When they can show that
the otherwise discriminatory practices
are required because of a business’ nature. So while it’s clear
that Shaquille O’Neil’s intimidating size
- 19. doesn’t mean he’ll be a bad accountant, the nature and rules of
horse racing require that riders be
diminutive, and that means Shaq would be a disaster. A horse
owner can show that the job requires a
physically little person to be successful. Thus size becomes a
BFOQ and a legitimate way of screening
applicants for that particular job.
A maker of men’s clothes can reasonably screen out women
from the applicant pool for models—but they
can’t eliminate female applicants from consideration for a sales
position. Or they could, but only if they
could show that maintaining a masculine public image was
integral to the success of the company. For
example, you could imagine a company called Manly
Incorporated, which sold products based on the
premise that every employee was a quality control officer.
Along similar lines, a Catholic school may screen atheists from
the search for a teacher, but it’s harder to
justify that filter for janitors. At the airport security line women
can be assigned to pat down women and
men to men, but either may apply for the job to hand check the
carry-on bags.
Another common screen is education. Imagine you have just
opened a local franchise of Jan-Pro, which
- 20. offers commercial cleaning services to car dealerships, gyms,
banks, churches, and schools.
[6]
What level
of education will you be looking for in potential employees?
Since the job involves mixing chemicals, it
seems like requiring some basic education is a fair demand, but
is a college degree necessary for the work?
You may have one as a manager, but that doesn’t mean you
should necessarily demand that much from
employees. And on the other side, is it fair to screen out
someone who’s got too much education, say a
master’s degree in chemistry? It does seems reasonable to
suspect that this kind of person will soon
become bored pushing a vacuum over carpets.
Then again, do you know that will happen? Is it fair to screen
based on what you suspect might occur?
Another type of screening catches high-risk lifestyles. Smoking
is one of the most often cited, and the
Humana company in Ohio is one of a growing number that’s
directly banning smoking—on or off work—
by new employees.
[7]
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These healthy lifestyle policies set off firestorms of ethical
debates. With respect to smoking and in broad
strokes, the company has an interest in prohibiting smoking
because that should mean healthier workers,
fewer sick days, lower health insurance premiums, and higher
productivity. In short: better working
workers. On the other side, job applicants (at least the smokers)
don’t believe that they’re less productive
than everyone else, and anyway, they resent being excluded for
a recreational habit pursued on their own
time. In long discussion boards—there are hundreds online—the
debate plays out. Here’s one exchange
from a typical board:
bonos_rama:
I wouldn’t hire anyone that has a habit of leaving their desk
every hour to stand outside for
10 minutes. Doesn’t matter if it’s to smoke, drink coke, or pass
gas that they’re leaving, it’s
bad for productivity.
- 22. Mother of a
Dr.:
But it’s OK to stand by the coffee pot and discuss sports and
politics? Productivity actually
improves when you get away from the computer every hour.
matt12341:
Even discounting the productivity argument, smokers tend to
have more long-term health
problems, leading to higher insurance premiums so companies
end up paying more.
jamiewb:
What if we apply this logic to people who are overweight? What
about people who have a
family history of cancer? Or a higher incidence of diabetes? As
long as it doesn’t impact job
performance, I don't think it’s fair to refuse to hire smokers.
happily-
retired:
I think it is a great idea to not hire smokers. Up next should be
obesity, as it leads to diabetes,
heart problems, joint problems, etc. Companies following that
- 23. path would be demonstrating
good corporate citizenship by fostering a healthier America.
Zom Zom:
Yes, the good citizenship of fascism. Now my employer has the
right to dictate what I do with
my body? “Land of the free,” unless your boss doesn’t like the
choices you make.
[8]
You can see that underneath the back-and-forth, this is
ultimately a debate about ethical perspectives.
One side tends toward a utilitarian position: the greater good in
terms of health and related issues justifies
the filtering of smokers in hiring decisions. The other side tends
toward a fundamental rights position:
what I do with my time and body is my decision only. Both
sides have strong arguments.
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Criminal record screening is another common filter for job
applicants. Most states won’t allow employers
to deny someone fair consideration for a job only because of a
prior criminal conviction. There’s wiggle
- 24. room, though. In New York, Article 23-A of the correction law
certifies that employment may be denied if
nship between the criminal offense
committed and the employment sought,
the safety or welfare of others.
Those are big loopholes. The first one means the Brinks
armored car company can legally refuse to
consider ex-bank robbers for a position. It may also apply to the
shoplifter who wants to be a cashier or
the drug dealer who wants a job in the pharmacy.
The second exception is still broader and applied in Grafter v.
New York City Civil Service
Commission.
[9]
In that case, the Fire Department of New York refused to hire
Grafter because he’d been
caught drunk driving on his last job. A potentially drunken
fireman does seem like a risk to the welfare of
others. Pushing that further out, the same would probably go if
he applied to be a taxi driver. In fact, the
list of jobs that may seem dangerous for others if the worker is
drunk extends a long way, probably
- 25. everything in construction, transportation, or anything with
heavy equipment. So the law does allow
employers to resist hiring convicts across a significant range of
wrongdoing.
Finally, the basic ethical tension pulls in three competing
directions for any manager facing a criminal
hiring decision:
1. The ethical responsibility to recovering criminals.
Rehabilitation (via honest work) is good for ex-
convicts.
2. The manager’s responsibility to the company. Managers need
to avoid problems whenever
possible and keep the machine running smoothly so profits flow
smoothly too.
3. The company’s responsibility to the general public. If a taxi
syndicate is hiring ex-drunk drivers,
you’ve got to figure something’s going to go wrong sooner or
later, and when it does, the person who put
the driver behind the wheel will be partially responsible.
Social media is another potential filter. Fifty-six percent of
millennial believe that the words and pictures
they put on Facebook and Twitter shouldn’t be allowed to factor
into hiring decisions.
[10]
- 26. Recruitment
officers, they’re saying, shouldn’t be going through online
photo albums to check out the kinds of things
you and your buddies do on Friday nights.
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From the employers’ side, however, the argument in favor of
checking the pages is simple. If an applicant
is sufficiently incautious to leave pictures of massive beer
funnel inhalations available for just anyone to
see—and if they do that while they’re trying to put their best
face forward as job seekers—then God knows
what kind of stuff will be circulating once they’ve got a job. As
a manager, it’s part of your job to protect
the company’s public image, which means you’ve got to account
for clients and others maybe running the
same Google and Facebook searches that you are.
It’s an easy scenario to imagine: you hire someone with a
flamboyant online life. Soon after, a client
working with her gets nosey does a Google image search, and
what comes in at the top of the list is a
- 27. picture of your new employee slamming beers, chain-smoking
cigarettes, or maybe inhaling something
that’s not legal. This isn’t good and the person who looks really
bad is the supposedly mature manager
who allowed the whole thing to happen by hiring her.
Of course there’s always the standard but still powerful
argument that what employees do after hours is
their own business, but one of the realities inherent in the
Internet is that there is no such thing as “after
hours” anymore. Once something goes online, it’s there all the
time, forever. Managers need to take
account of that reality, which might mean rethinking old rules
about privacy.
Testing
Once an ad has been placed, and applicants have been pooled,
and the pool has been screened, the real
hard work of hiring begins: choosing from among apparently
qualified people. One tool used in the
selection process is applicant testing. There are various sorts of
tests, but no matter the kind, for it to be
legitimate; it should itself pass three tests. It ought to be
d. The test must measure abilities connected to the
specific job being filled. A prospective roadie for
- 28. Metallica shouldn’t be asked to demonstrate mastery of
Microsoft Excel, just as there’s no reason to ask an
accountant to wire up his cubicle with speakers blasting 115
decibels.
adjusted for the circumstances of the
testing session. If you’re checking to see how frequently
applicants for the post of TV weatherman have
predicted sunshine and it turned out to rain, and one woman
gets tested in Phoenix while another takes
Seattle, it’s pretty easy to see who’s going to win in terms of
raw numbers. Those numbers need to be
adjusted for the divergent levels of difficulty.
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be similar. Just like a broken clock is right
twice a day, an applicant for an interior design job who happens
to be color-blind might once in a while
throw together a carpet-sofa combination that doesn’t clash. A
good test eliminates the lucky hits, and
also the unlucky ones.
- 29. Of the many kinds of hiring tests now in use, the most direct try
to measure the exact skills of the
job. Skill tests can be simple. They’re also relatively easy to
control for validity, normalization, and
constancy. For example, applicants for a junior-level position in
copyediting at a public relations firm may
be given a poorly written paragraph about a fictional executive
and asked to fix up the spelling and
grammar.
Psychological and personality tests are murkier; it’s more
difficult to show a direct link between the
results and job performance. On one side, you’ve got a test that
probes your inspirations and fears, your
tastes and personal demons. On the other side, the test’s goal is
to reveal how well you can handle plain
work assignments. Here’s an example of the disconnect. The
following is a true-or-false question that
Rent-A-Center placed on one of its employee application tests: I
have no difficulty starting or holding my
bowel movement.
[11]
Well, it’s hard to see the link between bathroom performance
and the ability to rent washer and drier sets.
Rent-A-Center wouldn’t be asking, though, if they didn’t think
- 30. the link was there. And they could be right;
there may be some connection. One of the firmest sources of
belief in the link between personality profile
and job performance is the very interesting Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). That
specific test is the origin of the bathroom question. Other true-
or-false choices on the long test include the
following:
Now, the MMPI is a real test with a long and noble history. One
of the things it tries to do is
establish correspondences. That is, if we take a group of
successful executives at Rent-A-Center and we
discover that they nearly universally have trouble in the
bathroom, then it may make sense to look for
people who suffer this discomfort when looking to recruit future
company leaders. As for the why
question—as in why is there a link between bathroom habits and
success?—that doesn’t matter for a
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- 31. correspondence test; all that matters is that some link is there.
And if it is, then you know where to look
when you’re hiring.
Theoretically, correspondence testing makes sense. Still, it’s
hard to know how applicants are going to
react to questions about sexual attraction and evil spirits.
Obviously, some are going to find the whole
thing too weird and not turn in responses that actually match
their profile. As for applicants and
employees of Rent-A-Center, they filed a lawsuit.
[12]
Inescapably, correspondence-type personality tests are
vulnerable to lawsuits because they’re explicitly
based on the premise that no one knows why the results indicate
who is more and less suitable for a post.
The administrators only know—or at least they think they
know—that the correspondence is there. It’s not
obvious, however, like it is with a simple skill test, so it makes
sense to imagine that some are going to
doubt that the test is valid; they’re going to doubt that it really
shows who’s more and less qualified for a
job.
- 32. So the problems with psychological tests include validity failure
and lawsuits. Problems with constancy
and normalization could also be developed. Added to that, there
are invasion of privacy questions that are
going to get raised whenever you start asking perspective
employees about their bathroom habits and
bedroom wishes.
On the other hand, it needs to keep being emphasized that the
tests do happen, and that’s not a
coincidence. At the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park,
recruiter Nathan Giles reports that the tests
he administers—with true-or-false questions including “It’s
maddening when the court lets guilty
criminals go free”—actually do produce valuable results. They
correlate highly, he says, with personal
interviews: if you do well on the test, you’re going to do well
face to face. And though the application and
interpretation of these tests are expensive, in the long run
they’re cheaper than interviewing everyone.
Finally, if that’s true, then don’t managers have a responsibility
to use the tests no matter how heated the
protests?
[13]
- 33. Lie detectors in the Hollywood sense of wires hooked up to the
fingers for yes-or-no interrogations are
illegal except in highly sensitive and limited cases, usually
having to do with money (bank guards) and
drugs (pharmaceutical distribution). Written honesty tests are
legal. Generally, the questions populating
these exams resemble those found on psychological tests, and
deciphering the results again works through
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correlation. Obviously, the test can’t work directly since both
honest and dishonest people will answer
“yes” to the question “are you honest?” Here are some typical
questions that do get asked:
Medical tests are generally only considered appropriate when
the specific job is labor intensive. As always,
there’s a difference between testing and prying, and it’s your
responsibility as a manager to limit the
questioning to specifically work-related information. Questions
- 34. about past physical problems are
generally considered off limits as are future problems that may
be indicated by family health history. A
simple example of an appropriate medical test would be a vision
examination for a truck driver.
When Michael Phelps—the thick-grinned Olympic swimming
hero—got photographed pulling on a bong,
he immediately failed the drug test with one of his employers:
Kellogg’s breakfast cereal. He wouldn’t be
hired again, the company explained, because smoking pot “is
not consistent” with the company’s image.
The National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws
rushed to disagree, insisting that the problem’s
not that the drugs are bad; it’s the law that’s outdated and
wrongheaded. They were supported, NORML
claims, by the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
[14]
However that might be, it’s seems difficult to object to
Kellogg’s argument. The reason they’d hire Michael
Phelps in the first place is to brand their product with the image
of beaming, young health, not zoning out
in front of the TV eating Doritos. Whether it’s legal or not, pot
smoking is going to clash with the job
description.
- 35. But what if he hadn’t been caught by someone with a camera?
Would Kellogg’s have the right to demand a
drug test before signing Phelps up as a representative? It
depends where you are. Because there’s no
broad federal law on the subject, the rules change depending on
your state, even your city. If you’re
looking for a job and you share a pastime with Michael Phelps,
you may be in trouble in Alaska where any
employer can test any applicant at any moment. In Arizona, on
the other hand, you have to get written
warning beforehand, which might allow for some cleanup. And
if you’re applying for a government job in
Berkeley, California, you can party on because a local
ordinance prohibits testing.
[15]
Looking at the Berkeley law allows a sense of the central
ethical conflict. On one side, the employers’, the
obvious and strong argument is that drug use negatively affects
work performance, so evaluating job
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prospects in terms of their future productivity implies, it almost
requires, making sure they’re not
- 36. distracted or disoriented by drug habits. In contrast, the
Berkeley ordinance persuasively states that
mandatory drug testing fails two distinct tests:
1. It assumes guilt instead of innocence.
2. It invades the individual’s privacy.
Deciding about drug tests seems to come down to deciding
whose legitimate rights deserve higher billing:
the employer’s or the employee’s.
In 1971 the US Supreme Court banned intelligence quotient
(IQ) testing except in very limited
circumstances after finding that the tests disparately affected
racial minorities. Further, serious IQ tests
(as opposed to seven-question Internet quizzes) are extremely
expensive to apply, so even if it were legal,
few employers would use the test with any frequency.
Conclusion. Tests applied by employers to job applicants
include those probing skills, psychological
profile, honesty, medical condition, and drug use.
Interviewing
In 1998 the Indianapolis Colts had a very good problem.
Holders of the top pick in the National Football
- 37. League draft, they had to choose between two exceptional
players: two that everyone agreed radiated
Super Bowl talent. Both were quarterbacks. Peyton Manning
had a better sense of the field and smoother
control of the ball; Ryan Leaf had a larger frame and more arm
strength. Which would make the better
employee? The call was so close that the team with the second
choice, the San Diego Chargers, didn’t care
much who the Colts selected; they’d be happy with either one.
The Colts didn’t have the luxury of letting the choice be made
for them, and as draft day approached they
studied film of the players’ college games, poured over
statistics, measured their size, speed, and how
sharply and accurately they threw the ball. Everything. But they
couldn’t make a decision.
So they decided to interview both candidates. The key question
came from Colts coach Jim Mora. He
asked the young men, “What’s the first thing you’ll do if
drafted by the Colts?” Leaf said he’d cash his
signing bonus and hit Vegas with a bunch of buddies. Manning
responded that he’d meet with the rest of
the Colts’ offense and start going over the playbook. Mora saw
in Manning a mature football player ready
for the challenges of the sport at its highest level. In Leaf he
- 38. saw an unpredictable kid.
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More than a decade later, Peyton Manning heads into another
season as starting quarterback. Having won
the Super Bowl, set countless team and NFL passing records,
and assured himself a spot in the NFL Hall
of Fame, you can understand that the Colts are happy with their
selection.
Ryan Leaf has recently been indicted on burglary and drug
charges in Texas. He got the news while in
Canada at a rehab clinic. As for football, after a rocky first few
seasons, his performance collapsed entirely.
He hasn’t been on a field in years.
Interviews matter. Grades, recommendation letters, past
successes, and failures on the job—all those
numbers and facts carry weight. But for most hiring decisions,
nothing replaces the sense you get of a
candidate face to face; it’s the most human part of the process.
Because it’s so human, it’s also one of the most ethically
treacherous. Two factors usually weigh heavily in
deciding which questions should and shouldn’t be asked:
- 39. 1. Fairness
2. Pertinence
Fair questioning means asking similar questions to all
applicants for a post. If the position is entry level,
many candidates will be young, inexperienced, and probably
easily flustered. That’s normal. So too there’s
nothing necessarily wrong with trying to knock applicants off
rhythm with a surprise or trick question.
The problem comes when one candidate gets pressed while
another gets softballs.
What do tough questions look like? One answer comes from
Google. There are always blog entries
circulating the Internet from applicants talking about the latest
weird questions asked by that successful
and unpredictable company:
proportionally reduced so as to maintain your
original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass
blender. The blades will start moving in 60
seconds. What do you do?
- 40. Seattle?
his wife. Every wife in the village instantly
knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does
not know when her own husband has.
The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife
who can prove that her husband is
unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village
would never disobey this law. One day,
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the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one
husband has been unfaithful. What
happens?
Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old
nephew.
[16]
We’re a long way from “why do you want to work at Google?”
and even further from “what was your
biggest accomplishment or failure in your last job?” Those are
softballs; anyone going into Google for an
interview is going to have prepared answers to those. It’s like
reading from a script. But looking at the
- 41. hard questions Google actually poses, there is no script, and you
can see how things could go south
quickly. You can’t figure out about golf balls and school buses,
and you start to get nervous. Next, the
blender question seems odd and threatening, and it’s all
downhill from there. Some interviews just don’t
go well and that’s it. As an applicant, you probably don’t have
too much to complain about as long as the
next guy gets the same treatment. But if the next guy gets the
softballs, the fairness test is getting failed.
As a manager, you can go hard or soft, but you can’t change up.
On the question of pertinent interview questions, the Google
queries seem, on the face, to be troublesome.
Is there any job that requires employees to escape from a
blender? No. But there are many jobs that
require employees to solve unfamiliar problems calmly,
reasonably, and creatively. On that ground, the
Google questions seem perfectly justifiable as long as it’s
assumed that the posts being filled require those
skills. By confronting prospective employees with unexpected
problems demanding creative solutions,
they are, very possibly, rehearsing future job performance.
When the Colts were interviewing Peyton Manning and Ryan
- 42. Leaf, something similar happened at the key
moment. At first glance, it seems like the question about the
first thing each player would do after draft
day wouldn’t reveal much about all the other days to come. But
the guys probably weren’t prepared for the
question, and so they had to reveal how they’d face a rapidly
shifting reality that they had no experience in
dealing with, a reality just like the one they’d face the day after
the draft when they’d go from being college
students on campus to wealthy adults in the big world. That
makes the question pertinent. And that
explains why the answers that came back were telling. They
distinguished a great hire from one of the
sports world’s monumental bungles.
On the other side, what kinds of questions reveal employees’
personalities’ but not their job skills?
Interview consultants typically warn managers to avoid asking
about these subjects:
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- 43. Except in special circumstances (a job is with a church, a
political party, or similar), these kinds of
questions fall under the category of privacy invasion.
Finally, there are legal red lines to respect. While managers
should ensure that applicants are old enough
to work and so can confirm that people are, say, eighteen or
older, it’s discriminatory in the legal sense to
hire one person instead of another because of an age difference.
This means asking “how old are you?” is
an off-limits question. It’s also illegal to ask about citizenship,
though you can ask whether applicants are
legally authorized to work in the United States. It’s illegal to
ask about disabilities, except as they relate
directly to the job. It’s illegal to ask about past drug and
alcohol use, though you may ask applicants
whether they are now alcoholics or drug addicts.
The interviewer’s fundamental responsibility is to choose the
best applicant for the job while giving
- 44. everyone a fair shot. Being fair isn’t difficult; all you need to
do is just ask everyone the standard
questions: Why do you want to work for our company? What are
your strengths? How do you work with
others? Do you stay cool under pressure? The problem here,
though, is that it’s easy to get gamed. It’s too
easy for applicants to say, “I love your company, I’m a team
player, and I never get mad.” Since everyone
knows the questions and answers, there’s a risk that everything
will be fake. And that makes identifying
the best applicant nearly impossible.
One response to this is to junk the standard questions and come
up with surprising and (seemingly) crazy
questions like they do at Google. Another strategy is a different
kind of interview. A situational or
behavioral interview asks candidates to show how they work
instead of talking about it.
Here’s how it goes. Instead of asking an applicant, “Do you stay
cool under pressure?” (the correct
response is “yes”), the question gets sharpened this way:
You know how jobs are when you need to deal with the general
public: you’re always going to get
the lady who had too much coffee, the guy who didn’t sleep last
- 45. night and he comes in angry and
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ends up getting madder and madder…at you. Tell me about a
time when something like this
actually happened to you. What happened? How did you deal
with it?
It’s harder to fake this. Try it yourself, try inventing a story.
Unless you’re a real good liar, you’re going to
hear the slipperiness in your own voice, the uncertainty and
stammering that goes with making things up.
Probably, most people who get hit with situational questions are
going to opt for the easiest route, which
is tell the truth and see how it goes. So the advantage to this
kind of interview is that it helps sort out
qualified candidates by giving an unvarnished look at how they
confront problems. On the other side,
however, there’s also a disadvantage here, one coming from the
fairness side. If candidate A has spent
years at the counter of Hertz and candidates B through G have
all been working in the Hertz back office, of
course the counter person is going to do better.
- 46. K E Y T A K E A W A Y S
limiting the job announcement to ensure that
applicants are appropriate, and widely publicizing the
announcement to ensure that applicants include
highly qualified individuals.
be implemented through nepotism, internal
public job announcements, and mass public job announcements.
applicants makes the hiring process more
efficient but raises ethical concerns.
requirements, high-risk lifestyles, criminal
record, and an applicant’s social media history.
icants’ suitability for a post to be
measured but raises ethical concerns.
personality tests, honesty tests, medical tests, and
drug tests.
evaluating job candidates, but questions ought to
be fair and pertinent to job-related concerns.
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R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S
1. Why might an employer opt for nepotism when hiring?
2. What is an advantage of a mass public job announcement?
3. Invent a job description that would allow applicants to be
screened by a BFOQ.
4. Why might an applicant pool be screened for use of social
media?
5. List the three requirements for a fair and legitimate job-
applicant test.
6. How do psychological and personality tests work through
correspondence?
7. Imagine a job and then an interview question for applicants
that would not be pertinent and one that
would be pertinent.
8. Why might a behavioral interview be used?
[1] R. Donaldson (director), The Recruit (Burbank, CA:
Touchstone Pictures, 2003), film.
[2] “Fortune: P&G Admits Spying on Hair Competitors,”
Business Courier, August 30, 2001, accessed May 24,
- 48. 2011,http://cincinnati.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2001/0
8/27/daily43.html.
[3] Marti’s Musings, “Nepotism Sucks,” August 30, 2004,
accessed May 24,
2011,http://businessethicsworkshop.com/Chapter_8/Nepotism_s
ucks.html.
[4] Klaus Kneale, “Is Nepotism So Bad?,” Forbes, June 20,
2009, accessed May 24,
2011,http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/19/ceo-executive-hiring-
ceonewtork-leadership-nepotism.html.
[5] “Texas Man Settles Discrimination Lawsuit Against Hooters
for Not Hiring Male Waiters,” Fox News, April 21,
2009, accessed May 24,
2011,http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517334,00.html.
[6] “2011 Fastest-Growing Franchise,” Entrepreneur, accessed
May 24,
2011,http://www.entrepreneur.com/franchises/fastestgrowing/in
dex.html.
[7] Megan Wasmund, “Humana Enforces Mandatory Stop
Smoking Program,” wcpo.com, June 16, 2009, accessed
June 7,
2011,http://www2.wcpo.com/dpp/news/local_news/Humana-
Enforces-Mandatory-Stop-Smoking-
Program.
- 49. [8] “Humana: We Won’t Hire Smokers,” Newsvine.com, June
16,
2009,http://sorrelen.newsvine.com/_news/2009/06/16/2935298-
humana-we-wont-hire-smokers.
[9] Grafter v. New York City Civil Service Commission, 1992.
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[10] Wei Du, “Job Candidates Getting Tripped Up By
Facebook,” MSNBC.com, August 14, 2007, accessed May 24,
2011, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20202935/page/2.
[11] Martin Carrigan, “Pre-Employment Testing—Prediction of
Employee Success and Legal Issues,” Journal of
Business & Economics Research 5, no. 8 (August 2007): 35–44.
[12] Karraker v. Rent-A-Center, 2005.
[13] Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Employers Relying on Personality
Tests to Screen Applicants, “Washington Post, March
27, 2005, accessed May 24,
2011,http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4010-
2005Mar26.html.
[14] Paul Armentano, “The Kellogg Company Drops Michael
Phelps, The Cannabis Community Drops
Kellogg’s,” NORML (blog), February 6, 2009, accessed May
- 50. 24, 2011,http://blog.norml.org/2009/02/06/the-
kellogg-company-drops-michael-phelps-the-cannabis-
community-drops-kelloggs.
[15] American Civil Liberties Union, “Testing Chart,” aclu.org,
accessed May 24,
2011,http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/testing_chart.pdf.
[16] Michael Kaplan, “Want a Job at Google? Try These
Brainteasers First,”CNNMoney.com, August 30,
2007,http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/29/technology/brain_teaser
s.biz2/index.htm.
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8.2 Wages
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Explore the limits of wage confidentiality.
2. Delineate the uses and ethics of wages as a work incentive.
Two Salary Issues Facing Managers
Two salary issues facing managers are wage confidentiality and
the use of wages as a work incentive.
Starting with wage confidentiality, in the private sector it’s
frequently difficult to discover what an
- 51. organization’s workers are paid. Because of freedom of
information laws, many salaries in government
operations and contracting are available for public viewing, but
in the private sector, there are no laws
requiring disclosure except in very specific circumstances.
The main ethical reason for keeping wage information
concealed is the right to privacy: agreements struck
between specific workers and their companies are personal
matters and will likely stay that way. Still,
ethical arguments can be mounted in favor of general
disclosure. One reason is to defend against
managerial abuse. In a law firm, two paralegals may have
similar experience, responsibilities, and
abilities. But Jane is single and living in a downtown apartment
while John has just purchased a home
where his wife is living and caring for their newborn. Any boss
worth his salt is going to see that Jane’s got
no local commitments and, who knows, she may just up and
decide to spend a few months traveling, and
then make a run at living in some different city. Maybe she
likes skiing and a few years in Denver don’t
sound bad. John, on the other hand, is tied down; he can’t just
walk away from his job. He can always get
- 52. a new one, of course, but if money’s tight and a recession is on,
there’s an incentive to raise Jane’s salary
to keep her and not worry so much about John who probably
won’t be going anywhere anyway. That
seems to be taking unfair advantage of John’s personal
situation, and it also seems like paying someone
for something beyond the quality of the work they actually do.
But if no one knows what anyone else is
making, the boss may well get away with it.
Stronger, the boss may actually have an obligation to try to get
away with it given his responsibility to
help the company maximize its success.
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Another argument against confidentiality is the general stand in
favor of transparency, and in this case,
it’s transparency as a way of guaranteeing that ethical standards
of equality are being met. Since the
signing of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, the ideal of “equal pay
for equal work” has become a central business
ethics imperative in the United States. But it’s hard to know
whether the equality is really happening
- 53. when no one knows how much anyone else is making.
Of course, workers do frequently know how much other people
are getting. In an extreme case, if you’re
laboring in a union shop, it’s probable that your wage scale will
be set identically to those of your
companions. Even if you’re not unionized, though, people still
talk at the water cooler. The result is, in
practice, that some wage transparency is achieved in most
places. From there, arguments can be mounted
for the expansion of that transparency, but in most cases, the
weight of privacy concerns will carry the
day.
Another wage issue concerns its use to provide a work
incentive. Many sales positions have the incentive
explicitly built in as the employees receive a percentage of the
revenue they generate. (That’s why
salespeople at some department stores stick so close after
helping you choose a pair of pants; they want to
be sure they get credit for the sale at checkout.) In other jobs,
generating a motivation to work well isn’t
tremendously important. The late-night checkout guy at 7-
Eleven isn’t going to get you out of the store
with cigarettes and a liter of Coke any faster just because his
salary has been hiked a dollar an hour.
- 54. Between the two extremes, however, there are significant
questions.
Probably, the main issue involving the use of wages as a carrot
in the workplace involves clarity. It’s quite
common, of course, for managers to promise an employee or a
team of workers a pay hike if they win a
certain account or meet productivity goals. Inevitably, the
moment of the promise is warm and fuzzy—
everyone’s looking forward to getting something they want, and
no one wants to sour things by
overbearingly demanding specifics. The problems come
afterward, though, if the terms of the agreement
have been misunderstood and it begins to look like there’s an
attempt to worm out of a promised salary
increase. It is management’s responsibility as the proposers of
the accord to be sure the terms are clearly
stated and grasped all around:
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- 55. The mirror image of promised wage hikes to encourage
improved worker performance is the bonus paid
at year’s end to employees marking a job well done. In a letter
to the editor of the Greensboro News-
Record in North Carolina, a teacher cuts to the central ethical
problem of the bonus: on the basis of what
do some employees receive one while others don’t? Some
teachers, the writer states, “at schools with high
‘at-risk’ populations and students coming from homes where
education is just not valued, work
themselves into a tizzy every year, but because of the clientele
they serve, will never see that bonus money.
Inversely, schools with middle-class clienteles have teachers
who work hard, but also others who merely
go through the motions but usually can count on that bonus
because their students come from homes that
think education matters. Where is the justice in this?”
[1]
It’s not clear where the justice is, but there’s no doubt that
bonuses aren’t serving their purpose. The
problem here isn’t a lack of clarity. No one disputes that the
rules for assigning a bonus are clear. The
problem is that the rules don’t seem to account for divergent
working conditions and challenges.
- 56. The important point, finally, is that even though a bonus is
extra money outside the basic salary structure,
that doesn’t mean it escapes the question, “Where’s the justice
in this?,” coming with every decision about
who gets how much.
K E Y T A K E A W A Y S
desire for, and benefits of, transparency.
problems arise when the pay increments
don’t obviously align well with promises or with job
performance.
R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S
1. Why might a company want to maintain wage confidentiality?
2. What is an example of a payment bonus becoming
disconnected from work performance?
[1] Bill Toth, “Entire State ABC Bonus System Unfair,” News-
Record.com, Letters to the Editor, August 19, 2008,
accessed May 24, 2011, http://blog.news-
record.com/opinion/letters/archives/2008/08/.
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8.3 Promoting Employees
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Distinguish criteria for promoting employees.
2. Locate and define ethical issues relating to promotion.
The Drinking Strategy
If you want a promotion, does going out for drinks with the
crew from work help the cause? Here’s a blog
post; it’s about two uncles—one who goes drinking with the
crew and one who doesn’t—and you’ll see why
the answer might be yes:
Look at my uncles, they both work for Ford and one has been in
his position for 10-plus years and
still doesn’t have a company car, while my other uncle has a
company car, increase salary, paid
training. Even though he comes home to my auntie blinded
drunk in the end it’s all worth it if you
want to be noticed.
[1]
Get hammered to get promoted! Too good to be true? Probably.
But not entirely, the Reason Foundation commissioned a report
- 58. on the question of whether drinkers earn
more money than nondrinkers.
[2]
The title “No Booze? You May Lose” pretty much tells what
the study
concluded about the link between social drinking with
workmates and promotions. A few things should be
noted, though. Drinking doesn’t mean coming home blind drunk
every night; it just means taking down
alcohol in some amount. And the payoff isn’t huge, but it is
respectable: about 10 percent pay advantage
goes to the wet bunch compared to those workers who stay dry.
The really interesting result, though, is
that guys who drink in bars at least once a month get another 7
percent pay advantage on top of the 10
percent. The bad news for drinking women is that for them,
going to the bars doesn’t seem to help.
So there are two findings. First, just drinking is better than not
drinking for your wallet. Second, at least
for men, drinking socially at bars is even better. One of the
study’s authors, Edward Stringham, an
economics professor at San José State University, comments on
the second result: “Social drinking builds
social capital. Social drinkers are networking, building
- 59. relationships, and adding contacts to their
Blackberries that result in bigger paychecks.”
[3]
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Now, going back to the blog comment about the drunken uncle,
isn’t this more or less what the blogger
sees too? Here are the next lines from the entry:
No senior management wants to promote a boring old fart. They
want outgoing people, in and
outside of work. They want social people. If you can display
your social abilities to them, it means
that you want more than the 9am to 5pm, thank God, time to go
home. They want people who
enjoy working with the company and the people who they work
for.
[4]
That sounds reasonable, and it may explain why there’s some
serious scientific evidence that partying
with the workmates does, in fact, lead to promotions in the
company.
- 60. The link between lifting a glass and moving up may be solid,
but is it right? From the worker’s side,
there’s not a lot you can do about the situation so you may want
to leave some Thursday and Friday
evenings available for happy hour regardless of whether you
think that’s the way promotions ought to be
arranged. From management side, however, there is a stark issue
here. When you sit down to look at two
candidates in your company for one promotion, do you have a
right to consider how well they mix after
hours? Do you have a duty or responsibility to consider it?
There are two issues:
1. Should you consider a worker’s party aptitude?
2. If you do, how should you manage it?
The reasons for not considering party ability are many. Two
stand out. First, workers are being paid for
what they do from nine to five. That’s the job. If you’re going
to start considering other things, then why
stop at parties? You could give the promotion to the better
player on the company softball team, or the
one who’s got curlier hair, or whatever. Second, workers may
not have an equal opportunity to party. The
- 61. guy who lives closer to work and isn’t married obviously holds
an advantage over the guy who has diabetes
when gin and tonics become job qualifications.
On the other hand, when workmates gather after work to drink,
what do they talk about? Well, work.
That’s why people say a new advertising campaign or a fresh
product idea got scratched onto a napkin. It’s
not a metaphor. Further, the ability to labor together with
others—teamwork—that’s a real job
qualification, and it’s reasonable to suppose that people who get
along well drinking will carry the
camaraderie over to the next morning’s breakfast meeting
(where coffee and tea are served). This explains
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why companies including Deloitte Consulting encourage and
even to some extent pressure employees to
socialize outside the office.
[5]
Finally, it’s a hard call—there are reasonable arguments to be
made on both sides. It’s also difficult to be
absolutely certain how the party qualification should be
- 62. managed if it’s included in the performance
evaluation. On one hand, a strong case can be made for
transparency and openness, for simply stating
that after-hours socializing is, in fact, a part of the job. To not
inform workers, the argument goes, that
hanging out is a job requirement is really a form of lying: it’s
dishonest because the default understanding
typical employees are going to have is that what counts in
determining the quality of work is the work,
period. Whether the assigned task got outlined in a cubicle or
on a bar stool is irrelevant. Therefore, any
manager who secretly totes up the social aptitude of the workers
is not being honest about the way
workers are graded. It’s the equivalent of a college teacher
assigning grades partially based on class
participation without listing that in the syllabus.
On the other hand, all teachers know that listing class
participation as part of a student’s grade can lead to
brown nosing, and there’s a similar threat in the workplace: if
employees are told to party, then at least a
few are going to tag along for drinks even when they really
don’t want to go and end up souring the
evening for everyone. If you as a manager believe in honesty
above all, then you may accept that cost. On
- 63. the other hand, if your vision of corporate responsibility
dovetails more closely with profit maximization,
you may be able to build an ethical case around the idea that in
the name of evaluating employees as
perfectly as possible some elements of that evaluation may have
to remain close to the vest.
Three Considerations for Promotion: Work Performance,
Seniority, Projected
Work Performance
When managing a promotion, there are three fundamental
considerations; work performance is the most
obvious. The person most deserving to step up to a higher level
of responsibility is the one who’s best
managed current responsibilities. This may be measured by
accounts won, contributions to a larger
group, or some other work-related factor, but the key is that the
measured performance be related with
the job.
The problem comes in determining exactly what that word
related means. When read narrowly, it means
that the employee who looks best on paper—the one who’s
written the best reports, achieved the highest
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sales, won the most cases—will be the most deserving. When
read broadly, however, the range of
considerations can expand dramatically to include contributions
having to do with personality, chemistry,
and other characteristics tangential to nine-to-five tasks. This is
where questions about going out for
drinks after work start to gain traction and importance. Finally,
it’s not clear that after-hours socializing
should be considered part of work performance, but the fact that
it can be included shows how broad this
category is.
The second consideration when weighing a promotion is
seniority. Seniority is preference for promotion
granted to the person who’s been with the company the longest.
A strong or pure seniority system simply
reduces the choice to comparisons of time with the firm: the
promotion goes to the longest-serving
employee. There’s a taste of fairness here since no one will be
overlooked for a job because of a personal
conflict with the boss, or because he doesn’t smile enough at
work, or because her skirt is too short or his
- 65. necktie too absurd or whatever. More, there’s an inherent
tranquility in the fact that all employees know
exactly where they stand. The connected problem, obviously, is
that good work is not directly rewarded.
This explains why the seniority system seems especially suited
to production line jobs or any kind of labor
where experience is more important than analytic skills, high-
level training, or creativity. If it’s true that
experience is what matters on a job, then a seniority system
should produce promotions that more or less
dovetail with expertise and the ability to do a good job.
A weak seniority system considers time with the company as a
positive element, but only as one
component in evaluating candidates for a promotion. The
advantage of this kind of system is the
encouraging of worker loyalty. The retention of good workers is
nearly the highest human resources
priority of any company, and rewarding seniority plus
performance gives good workers a reason to stick
around. Equally important, it helps retain good, loyal workers
without forcing the company to promote
old-timers who’ve never really learned to get the job done well.
The third promotion consideration is projected performance,
which evaluates candidates in terms of what
- 66. they’ll be able to do in the future. A tool used by companies to
groom young people for future leadership
roles, the escalation normally goes to highly qualified
individuals currently working at a level beneath
their ability. For example, a health insurance company may hire
a college graduate with a strong premed
profile and hope to keep that person out of medical school by
pulling her up the career ladder at a crisp
rate. She simply doesn’t have the experience, however (no one
does), to just start near the top. In order
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for her to play a leadership role in the future, she does need to
be familiar with how the company works at
every level, including the lowest. That means spending some
time on the front lines, say, manning
telephones, answering questions from (frequently frustrated or
angry) customers. Of course it’s difficult to
really stand out in this kind of work, so if she’s going to move
up, it’s going to have to be because she’s
expected to stand out at something more demanding later on.
Other employees are going to be tempted to resent the rapid
- 67. ascension since many of them have done just
as well at the same job for a longer time. Within the narrow
view of performance evaluation (your job
performance equals how well you do the work) their resentment
is justified. The rule of equal treatment is
being severely broken. But if you’re in management, you have a
responsibility to the company (and to
shareholders if the company is public) to be successful. And
you need to face the problem that highly
educated and qualified young people have options. Arguably,
retaining them is a higher priority—not just
financially but also ethically—than keeping more replaceable
talent content.
K E Y T A K E A W A Y S
d managers
may have a right to consider after-hours
activities as part of that definition.
work performance, and projected
performance. Each contains specific ethical tensions.
R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S
1. Why might someone’s social skills be considered a factor in
receiving a promotion?
- 68. 2. What are some advantages and disadvantages of seniority
promotion?
3. Why might a promotion be based on projected performance?
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[1] Maya, “Alcohol: Income Booster?,” Monster (blog),
September 20, 2006, accessed May 24,
2011,
http://monster.typepad.com/monsterblog/2006/09/alcohol_
income_.html.
[2] Bethany L. Peters and Edward Stringham, “No Booze? You
May Lose,” Reason Foundation, September 1, 2006,
accessed May 24,
2011,http://reason.org/news/show/127594.html.
[3] Bethany L. Peters and Edward Stringham, “No Booze? You
May Lose,” Reason Foundation, September 1, 2006,
accessed May 24,
2011,http://reason.org/news/show/127594.html.
[4] Maya, “Alcohol: Income Booster?,” Monster (blog),
September 20, 2006, accessed May 24,
2011,
http://monster.typepad.com/monsterblog/2006/09/alcohol_
income_.html.
- 69. [5] Deloitte Consulting: WetFeet Insider Guide (San Francisco:
WetFeet), accessed May 24,
2011,
http://www.wellesley.edu/Activities/homepage/consultingclub/w
etfeet%20-%20deloitte_consulting.pdf.
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8.4 Firing
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Define legal guidelines on firing employees.
2. Elaborate justifiable reasons for deciding to fire.
3. Set standards for the actual firing process.
4. Consider ways of limiting the need to terminate employees.
Optimal Level Firing
A study funded by the CATO Institute and titled “The Federal
Government Should Increase Firing Rate”
concludes this way: “The rate of ‘involuntary separations’ is
only about one-fourth as high in the federal
government as in the private sector. No doubt private-sector
firing is below optimal as well since firms are
- 70. under threat of expensive wrongful discharge lawsuits.”
[1]
There is, in other words, an optimal level for firing, and in both
the public and private sectors it’s not
being met. People aren’t being fired enough.
The strictly economic question here is, “What is the optimal
firing level?” No matter the answer, there’s an
ethical implication for the workplace: firing workers is a
positive skill. For managers to perform well—for
them to serve the interest of their enterprise by maximizing
workplace performance—the skills of
discharging employees must be honed and applied just like
those of hiring and promoting.
On the ethical front, these are the basic questions:
n employee be fired?
made?
world where firing is inevitable?
When Can an Employee Be Fired?
In the world of for-profit companies, most work contracts offer
- 71. at-will employment. Within this scheme, a
clause is written into the contract offering employment only as
long as the employer desires. Stated more
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aggressively, managers may discharge an employee whenever
they wish and for whatever reason. Here’s a
standard version of the contractual language:
This is an “At Will” employment agreement. Nothing in
Employer’s policies, actions, or this
document shall be construed to alter the “At Will” nature of
Employee’s status with Employer,
and Employee understands that Employer may terminate his/her
employment at any time for
any reason or for no reason, provided it is not terminated in
violation of state or federal law.
The legal parameters for firing seem clear.
Things blur, however, once reality hits. As the Cato study
authors note, simply the fear of a possible
lawsuit does impinge to some extent on the freedom to fire,
especially when the discharged worker fits
into a protected group. This means older workers, foreigners, or
- 72. disabled workers may protest that no
matter what reasons are given for termination—assuming some
are given—the real reason is their age,
nationality, or disability. Further, gender protection may be
claimed by women fired from largely male
companies and vice versa.
Another round of blurring occurs on the state level where
legislation sometimes adds specific employee
protections, and so curtails employers’ rights. In Minnesota, for
example, firing may not be based on a
worker’s participation in union activities or the performance of
jury duty.
These varied and frequently changing legal protections are the
reason managers are typically instructed to
keep detailed records of employee performance. If those can be
produced to show a pattern of
incompetence or simply inadequate results, they can justify a
dismissal before a judge, if it ever comes to
that.
Even though legal complexities mean managers are well advised
to be careful about firing workers, and
it’s prudent to be sure that there are directly work-related
reasons for the dismissal, none of that changes
- 73. the fact that at-will hiring gives wide latitude to the company,
and fired workers are typically left with few
good avenues of protest. One way to see how tilted the table is
toward the employer and away from the
employee is to compare the American at-will firing system with
the European model, where a reasonable
cause for termination must be demonstrated. In the United
States, employers may more or less fire
anyone for any reason, and the burden of showing the
termination was illegal or unfair falls entirely on
the worker. In Europe, by contrast, the legal burden falls largely
on the employer. Instead of the worker
having to show the firing was wrong, now the company has to
show the firing was right. This is a big deal.
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It’s like the difference between innocent until proven guilty and
guilty until proven
innocent. Just because firing means the company holds the
burden of proof: it must demonstrate that the
worker wasn’t holding up his or her end of the employment
contract. That’s a lot harder to do than just
producing some work evaluations to buttress the claim that she
- 74. wasn’t fired because she’s Jewish or he
wasn’t let go because he’s Asian. As opposed to the European
reality, the conclusion is, employees in the
United States hired at will have little recourse against a
company that wants them out.
Finally, it’s worth noting that elements of just cause law have
been working their way into the American
legal system in recent years.
When Should an Employee Be Fired?
Because the legal footing is usually more or less solid for
American managers, the real hard questions
about terminating employees aren’t legal ones about what can’t
be done but ethical ones about what
should be done.
Sometimes firing is unavoidable. Economic slowdowns
frequently bring furloughs and terminations.
When the company’s books turn red, and after the entire easy
cost cutting has been done, people need to
be cut. Who? There are three broad philosophies:
1. Inverted seniority
2. Workload
3. Recovery preparation
- 75. Inverted Seniority occurs when the last worker hired is the first
released. This works especially well for
assembly-line-type labor where one worker can replace another
easily. As long as replacement is possible,
dismissing the most recently hired allows clear and impersonal
rules to make downsizing orderly.
Workload firings focus the pain of job cuts on that part of the
company suffering most directly from a
falloff in business. An office furniture supply company may
find its line of hospital products unaffected by
an economic downturn (people keep getting sick even if they
don’t have a job) so layoffs are taken from
other divisions. This may mean losing workers with higher
seniority or better job performance, but it
minimizes cash-flow disruption.
Recovery preparation takes the long view on an economic
slowdown: firings and layoffs are executed not
so much to compensate for the present downturn but to sharpen
the company for success when the
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economy bounces back. Staying with the office furniture supply
- 76. company, the owner may see better long-
term opportunities for profits in the nonhospital units, so the
downsizing may occur across the board. The
idea is to keep those slow-moving units at least minimally
prepared to meet new demand when it
eventually comes.
Sometimes economic slowdowns don’t reflect a problem with
the larger economy, they’re the result
of fundamental changes in the market, frequently brought on by
technological advance. For example, the
popularization of digital photography has shrunk the market for
old fashioned film. Seeing this coming,
what can a company like Kodak do? They’re probably going to
let workers from the old film side go to
create room for new hires in the digital division. This is
potentially unfair to terminated workers because
they may be doing exemplary work. Still, it would be unfair—
and financially disastrous—to the company
as a whole to not change with the times.
Rank and yank is a management philosophy promoted by former
General Electric Company CEO Jack
Welch. Every year, he counsels, the entire workforce should be
ranked and the bottom 10 percent
- 77. (“There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” he says) should be fired to
make room for new employees who may be
able to perform at a higher level. Here, the responsibility to the
company is being weighed far heavier than
the one to the employee because, theoretically at least, those in
the bottom 10 percent may be doing fine
on the job—fulfilling their responsibilities adequately—it’s just
that others out there who could be hired to
replace them may do it better. In the hope they will, workers
who’ve done nothing wrong are sacrificed.
[2]
There are two main criticisms of this practice. First, it’s a
betrayal of employees who are fulfilling their
contractual obligations (they’re just not over performing as well
as others). Second, it’s counterproductive
because it lowers morale by drowning workers in the fear that
even though they’re doing what’s being
asked, they may end up in that dreaded bottom 10 percent.
Employee misbehavior is the least controversial reason to fire a
worker. Here, the ethics are relatively
clear. Employees aren’t being mistreated when they’re
dismissed because it’s their own actions that lead
to their end. Standard definitions of misbehavior include
- 78. personal business,
t and unexplained absences from work,
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ion, religious,
racial, and similar).
How Should an Employee Be Fired Once the Decision’s Been
Made?
At the Friday all-staff meeting the office manager stands up to
announce, “The good news is the following
people have not been fired!” He reads a list of seventeen names.
There are nineteen people at the meeting.
That’s from a (perhaps unemployed) comic’s stand-up routine.
Unfortunately, people have written into
the CNNMoney.com with real stories that aren’t so far removed:
- 79. news of her firing in a curt letter
delivered to her home by FedEx.
and being humiliatingly sent away.
changed and their stuff thrown in a box
sitting on the floor.
[3]
All these are inhumane firings in the sense that no flesh and
blood person took the trouble to present the
bad news.
It’s easy to understand why inhumane firings occur: not many
people enjoy sitting down with someone
and telling them they’re out. So it’s tempting to yield to
cowardice. Instead of facing the worker you’ve
fired, just drop a note, change the lock, and talk to security. On
the ethical level, however, firing an
employee is no different from working with an employee: as a
manager, you must balance your duties to
the company and the worker.
How can the manager’s duty to the organization be satisfied
when terminating a worker? First, to the
extent possible, the fired person should leave with a positive
- 80. impression of the organization. That means
treating the employee with respect. No mailed notices of
termination, no embarrassing lockouts, just a
direct, eye-to-eye explanation are probably the most reliable
rule of thumb.
Second, the terminated employee should not be allowed to
disrupt the continued work of those who
remain. If deemed necessary, security personnel should be
present to ensure the ex-worker leaves the
premises promptly. Also, if the worker is involved in larger
projects, a time for severance should be found
when their contribution is minimal so that other members of the
team will be able to carry on near
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normally. (It may be recommendable to arrange the termination
to coincide with the finishing of a larger
project so that everyone may start fresh with the new, substitute
employee.)
Third, the financial costs of the termination should be
minimized. This means having clear reasons for the
termination and documents (pertaining to worker performance
or behavior) supporting the reasons to
- 81. guard against lawsuits. Also, there should be clear
understandings and prompt payment of wages for work
done, as well as reimbursements for travel expenses and the full
satisfaction of all monetary obligations to
the employee. This will allow the human resources department
to close the file.
With duties to the company covered, how can the manager’s
duty to the employee be satisfied?
Consultants—both legal and ethical—typically share some
bullet-point answers. First, the employee
should be addressed honestly and directly with a clear
explanation for termination. Speak firmly, the
advice is; don’t waver or provide any kind of false hope.
Further, the termination should not come as a
total surprise. Previous and clear indications should have been
given concerning employee performance
along with specific directions as to what areas require
improvement. Many companies institute a structure
of written warnings that clearly explain what the employee’s job
is and why their work is not meeting
expectations.
Second, getting fired is embarrassing, and steps should be taken
to minimize the humiliation. The
- 82. employee should be the first to know about the discharge. Also,
the severance should occur in a private
meeting, not in view of other workers. To the extent possible,
the employee should have an opportunity to
say good-bye to workmates or, if this is the preference, to leave
discreetly. For this reason, a meeting late
in the day may be chosen as the appropriate time for notice to
be given.
Third, to the extent possible and within the boundaries of the
truth, an offer should be extended to
provide a recommendation for another job.
Fourth, make sure the employee gets all the money coming for
work done, without having to jump
through hoops.
What Steps Can Management Take to Support Workers in a
World Where Firing
Is Inevitable?
One response to the inescapable reality that firing happens is
preemptive; it’s to reduce the moral
uncertainty and hardship before they arise. Two strategies serve
this purpose: actions can be
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implemented to minimize the occasions when firing will be
necessary, and steps can be taken to reduce
the severity of the firing experience for employees when it
happens.
In her book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Moss
Kanter generates a list of measures that
corporations use to diminish firings, and reduce the professional
impact for those who are let go. Here’s
an abbreviated selection of her recommendations, along with a
few additions:
for narrow skills to fill today’s slots.
: allow workers to expand their
competence.
-related
fields.
-related conferences and
meetings.
ticals for employees who want to
return to school.
employee into a self-guided professional.
- 84. concerning the direction of the company: What units
are more and less profitable? Which ones will grow? Which may
shrink?
[4]
K E Y T A K E A W A Y S
-will firing grants employers broad legal latitude to
discharge employees, but it does not erase ethical
concerns.
none, some, or all of the blame for the
discharge.
responsibilities to the organization and to the ex-
employee.
Steps can be taken to limit the need for, and effects of,
employee discharge.
R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S
1. What’s the difference between at-will and just cause firing?
2. How might fundamental changes in the marketplace require a
company to fire workers?
- 85. Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
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3. What is rank and yank?
4. When managers fire employees, what duties do they hold to
the organization, and what are the duties to
the dismissed worker?
5. What are some steps organizations can take to protect their
workers from the effects of discharge if firing
becomes necessary?
[1] Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven, “Federal Government
Should Increase Firing Rate,” Cato Institute, Tax and
Budget, no. 10 (November 2002), accessed May 24,
2011,http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0211-10.pdf.
[2] Allan Murray, “Should I Rank My Employees?,” Wall Street
Journal, accessed May 24,
2011, http://guides.wsj.com/management/recruiting-hiring-and-
firing/should-i- rank-my-employees.
[3] “Worst Ways to Get Fired,” CNNMoney.com, September 6,
2006, accessed May 24,
2011, http://money.cnn.com/blogs/yourturn/2006/09/worst-
ways-to-get-fired.html.
- 86. [4] List adapted from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women
of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1993),
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8.5 Case Studies
Fashionable
In her blog Love This, MJ (full name not provided) relates that
she’s been an aspiring clothes designer
since she started sewing tops for her Barbie dolls. Things
weren’t going well, though, as she tries to break
into the industry. One thing she notices is that there aren’t a lot
of female fashion designers out there—
Vera Wang, Betsey Johnson, and a few more. Not many. So she
starts trying to figure it out with questions
like these:
they dress to please the men? It could make
sense: what that designer likes, the man in her life is going to
love too.
m because gay men are
their new girlfriends? Gay men are usually
more receptive to trends and physical appearances too.
- 87. woman’s body better?
designer? Would they balk at being dressed
by a gay designer?
[1]
Q U E S T I O N S
1. Assume MJ is right when she hypothesizes that most women
like straight male designers because straight
guys are the ones they’re trying to impress, so they want clothes
straight guys like. Now imagine you’ve
been put in charge of a new line of women’s clothes. Your
number one task: sales success. You’ve got five
applicants for the job of designing the line. Of course you could
just ask them all about their sexual
Ima
ge re
mov
ed d
ue to
cop
yrig
ht is
- 88. sues
.
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orientation(s), but that might leave you open to a discrimination
lawsuit. So could you devise a test for
new applicants that’s fair—that gives everyone an equal
chance—but still meets your requirement of
finding someone who produces clothes that straight guys get
excited about?
2. Four standard filters for job applicants are
o education level,
o high-risk lifestyle,
o criminal record,
o flamboyant presence in social media.
Which of these might be used to winnow out applications for a
job as a clothes designer? Explain
in ethical terms.
3. MJ wonders whether women might prefer women designers
because she knows a woman’s body better. Is
there a bona fide occupational qualification for a women’s
- 89. fashion company to hire only women
designers? Is there a difference between a BFOQ based on sex
and one based on sexual orientation?
4. MJ asks, “Do women prefer gay men to dress them because
gay men are their new girlfriends?” Assume
you think there’s something to this. Could you design a few
behavioral interview questions that test the
applicants’ ability to become girlfriends (in the sense that MJ
means it) with their clients? Would these be
ethically acceptable interviews, or do you believe there’s
something wrong and unfair about them?
God at Work
Image
remov
ed due
to cop
yright
issues.
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The University of Charleston is a private, nonreligious
institution with a very particular job opening: the
- 90. Herchiel and Elizabeth Sims “In God We Trust” Chair in Ethics.
According to the job description, the
successful candidate for this job as a professor “must embrace a
belief in God and present moral and
ethical values from a God-centered perspective.”
[2]
Q U E S T I O N S
1. You’re in charge of getting applicants for this post and
you’ve got a small advertising budget. What ethical
responsibilities should you consider when determining where to
place the ad? How broadly should you
advertise the position?
2. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke
University, “The description that
‘candidates must embrace a belief in God and present moral and
ethical values from a God-
centered perspective,’ violates the Civil Rights Act as religious
discrimination in
employment.”
[3]
Imagine you’re in charge of every step of the process of filling
this job. How
could you respond in terms of
- 91. o bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs),
o testing,
o interviewing?
3. You’re the university president. The person who currently
holds the In God We Trust
Professorship has, by all accounts, been doing a mediocre to
poor (but not directly unacceptable)
job. One day you happen to trip across the person’s blog page
and notice that your professor
claims to be a sadist and practices a mild form of devil worship
(also, the prof’s favorite movie
is The Omen). Right now the In God We Trust Professor of
ethics is down the hall lecturing to
seventy-five undergrads. You sneak to the door and listen from
outside. The professor sounds just
like always: dull and passionless, but the talk is about the Bible,
and nothing’s being said that
seems out of line with the job description. Still, you decide to
terminate the relationship.
o In a pure at-will working environment, you can just fire the
professor. But imagine you want to
demonstrate just cause. How does this change the way you
approach the situation? What would
- 92. your just causes be?
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o The professor’s classes are passionless because he doesn’t
believe in what he’s teaching. Still, his
teachings are not directly wrong. Does this case show why a
manager may be ethically required in
certain situations to implement a strategy of rank and yank?
Explain.
Testing Baseball Players’ DNA
The New York Times reports that there’s a “huge difference
between sixteen and nineteen years old,”
when you’re talking about prospects for professional baseball.
A kid whose skills knock your socks off for a
sixteen-year-old just looks modestly good when he practices
with nineteen-year-olds.
[4]
This is a significant problem in the Dominican Republic, which
produces excellent baseball players but
little in the way of reliable paperwork proving who people
really are and when they were born. The
- 93. Cleveland Indians learned all about that when they gave a
$575,000 bonus to a seventeen-year-old
Dominican named Jose Ozoria, only to later find out he was
actually a twenty-year-old named Wally
Bryan.
This and similar cases of misidentification explain why baseball
teams are starting to apply genetic tests to
the prospects they’re scouting. Typically, the player is invited
to provide a DNA sample from himself and
his parents to confirm that he’s no older than he claims. The
player pays for the test and is reimbursed if
the results show he was telling the truth.
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due
to c
opy
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ues.
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Q U E S T I O N S
1. Many experts in genetics consider testing an unethical
violation of personal privacy.
o What does it mean to “violate personal privacy”?
o Can a utilitarian argument (the greatest good for the greatest
number should be sought) in favor
of DNA testing in the Dominican Republic be mounted? What
could it look like?
2. In the baseball world, other tests that clearly are allowed as
part of the hiring process include testing a
player’s strength and speed. Is there anything in the fair
application of these tests that may ethically
allow—even require—that baseball teams extract DNA to
confirm the age?
3. Assume you accept that testing a prospect’s age is a bona fide
occupational qualification (after all,
the job is to be a prospect: a developing player, not an adult
one). Once you accept that, how do
you draw the line? Couldn’t teams be tempted to use DNA facts
for other purposes?
The Times article interviews a coach who puts it this way:
- 95. I know [the baseball teams taking the DNA samples] are looking
into trying to figure out
susceptibility to injuries, things like that. If they come up with
a test that shows someone’s
connective tissue is at a high risk of not holding up, can that be
used? I don’t know.
[5]
Can you formulate an ethical argument in favor of teams
secretly using DNA tests to do just that,
check for as many yellow and red flags as possible in the young
prospect’s genetic code?
4. Baseball scouting—the job of hiring excellent future players
and screening out mediocre ones—is very
competitive. Those who do it well are paid well; those who
don’t are cycled out quickly to make room for
someone else. You have the job, you have the DNA sample.
What do you do? Why?
5. You decide to do the test in question four. The problem is
people aren’t trees; you can’t age them
just by counting genetic rings—you also need to do some cross-
testing with the parents’ DNA. You
do that and run into a surprise: it turns out that the young
prospect’s father who’s so proud of his
athletic son isn’t the biological dad. Now what?
- 96. o Is there an argument here against DNA testing, period? What
is it?
o Remember, the family paid for the test. Do you have a
responsibility to give them these results?
Explain.
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6. Lou Gehrig was the first athlete ever to appear on a box of
Wheaties. From 1925 to 1939 he played for the
Yankees in every game: 2,130 straight appearances, a record
that lasted more than fifty years. He was
voted into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. He died in 1941
from a genetic disorder—yes, Lou Gehrig’s
disease—that today’s DNA tests would identify. Is there an
ethical argument here against DNA testing of
prospects or one in favor? Or is the argument about this more
theoretical—should the rules be decided
regardless of what has actually happened at some time or place?
Explain.
7. In a different sport, the sprinter Caster Semenya won the
world eight-hundred-meter challenge in 2009
with a time that few men could equal. She looked, in fact,
- 97. vaguely like a man, which led the International
Athletics Federation to run a genetic gender test. She is, it turns
out, neither a woman nor a man; she’s a
hermaphrodite: a little bit of both. Does the fact that genetic
tests don’t always return clean, black-and-
white results make their use less advisable from an ethical
perspective? Why or why not?
Windfall at Goldman
Goldman Sachs is an expansive financial services company.
Many clients are institutional: private
companies and government organizations wanting to raise cash
seek Goldman’s help in packaging and
then selling stock or bonds. On the other side, private
investors—wealthy individuals wanting to multiply
their riches—receive a hearty welcome at Goldman because they
have the cash to purchase those stocks
and bonds. Ultimately, Goldman Sachs is a hub where large
companies, governmental powers, and
wealthy people come and do business together.
Imag
e rem
oved
due
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ight
issue
s.
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Executives at Goldman Sachs are among the world’s highest
paid. According to a New York Times article,
“At the center of Goldman’s lucrative compensation program is
the partnership. Goldman’s partners are
its highest executives and its biggest stars. Yet while Goldman
is required to report compensation for its
top officers, it releases very little information about this
broader group, remaining tightlipped about even
basic information like who is currently a partner.”
[6]
The rest of the article investigates this shadowy partnership.
The conclusions: “Goldman has almost 860
current and former partners. In the last 12 years, they have
cashed out more than $20 billion in Goldman
shares and currently hold more than $10 billion in Goldman