OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:
PCA-Ethical Communities Worksheet
Worksheet Objectives:
1. Understand the four ethical communities
2. Apply an ethical community to your personal case situation
Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.
1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.
My company is a bank, property and casualty and life insurance company. I am a Senior
Business Process Owner for the Enterprise. I also do various Project Management tasks.
Currently all the respective companies send email, text, and push notifications to our
members. Each of the companies uses their own schedule and messaging templates. Over the
past several years, messaging has gotten out of hand. My team is tasked with creating a
solution to govern and deliver consistent and pertinent messaging across the enterprise.
2) Describe how the ethics of the organization influenced the situation.
In the past, the organization ran in the political frame and could be easily described as the
metaphorical “jungle.” There was a constant fight for power. Power was not only sought
after by leadership but by the companies who were competing with one another. This led
to the different companies working in silos and leaders not communicating across the
channels with one another.
There was not anything necessarily unethical happening at the company, but it was chaos.
The political frame caused all the companies to begin using their own standards and
creating their own budgets, so it is no surprise the messages were not aligned with
eachother.
3) Recommend how you would apply one of the ethical community metaphors (see
Exhibit 20.1 in Bolman and Deal) for an alternative course of action regarding your
case.
To make this situation better and really fix the problem. I think the Human resources
frame aka “extended family” should be applied. Instead of competing against the other
companies we all need to care about the success of each of the companies so we can
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stand together as one. One compassionate and caring leader, like a father, would be a
good start.
We should begin to learn about each other and share goals and objectives so we can truly
begin working together.
4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about ethics.
I was not here when the initial problem occurred. I have been doing my best to be
effective and bring everyone together in a human resources frame. If I had been with the
company at the time, I would have certainly tried to keep this from getting so far off
course with some education and bringing together of people.
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Reference or References
(Choose appropriate Title if Applicable and Delete the Rest)
