Electropic LLC is a respected and profitable website design and hosting company in Colossal Corporation’s technology group. Melissa Aldredge has been a project manager at Electropic LLC for several years and was recently considered for promotion to a senior project manager position. Ultimately, the promotion was awarded to another long-term employee, June Pyle. June and Melissa have a history of one-upping each other and sharing an internal rivalry within the company.
Melissa recently reported internally that she had learned that June, who was given the promotion over her, had never finished her MBA degree. All of June’s business cards have “MBA” after her name, and the signature line of her email reads “June Pyle, MBA.”
Electropic LLC’s policy manual states that potential employees must submit transcripts for all degrees listed on their resumes. However, this requirement was not in place 10 years ago when June Pyle was hired. June has a history of stellar performance and was promoted not because of her MBA, but because of her consistently exemplary work. June has received excellent performance evaluations during her time at Electropic LLC, and her leadership has led to increased revenue as well as positive press for the company. Her record of success is what led to her promotion.
As a result of Melissa’s report, the director of human resources sent an email to all employees who were hired prior to the policy change requiring transcript validation, asking that they provide transcripts to validate their credentials. June did not respond to the director’s request for transcripts and was called into the director’s office. In a very tense and tearful interview, June confessed to the director that she does not have an MBA. She admitted that she was 12 credits away from completing her degree, but when her dad got sick, she had to drop out. She said that she really needed a job to support her family and she put the MBA on her resume hoping it would help her find a job. She shared that she always intended to go back to school but became so busy with work that she didn’t have time. Once she was hired, she felt that there was no turning back and she had to keep the lie going by placing “MBA” in her email signature line and on her business cards.
An MBA was not a requirement for the assistant project specialist job June was hired for 10 years ago, but four years ago, it was made a requirement for the senior project manager position she holds now. Two of the current senior project managers do not have MBA degrees because they were promoted before this requirement was in place.
Vice President Dodger has asked you to write a memo with your recommendations on how human resources should handle this issue. June has a record of excellence with Electropic LLC, and her superiors would be unhappy to lose her; however, ethical practice and the law must be considered here as well.
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Vice President Dodger has provided you with the Electropic LLC case file (above), which details recent events at Electropic LLC, one of Colossal’s technology companies. He has asked you to analyze the legal and ethical aspects of the case. The ethical aspects of the situation seem complex, and you realize that you need a structured way to think through the various resolutions to the case and their implications. You know that there are many different schools of ethical thought and a variety of frameworks or approaches for analyzing ethical problems, but you decide that the best approach to this particular situation is Badaracco’s right versus right framework (attached).
Use the Badaracco’s right vs. right framework prepare a legal analysis report. In your report be sure to:
* APA-formatted in-text citations and an APA-formatted reference list (do not format the body of the report using APA style, just the reference list). See references and citations for details.
* detailed analysis of all four questions and three tests of the Badaracco framework;
* include an analysis of the legal issues
* a specific recommendation on what actions, if any, HR should take based on your legal and ethical analysis and conclusions.
* Report should be 6-8 pages long, not including references/title page
Use the learning topics provided as main references, but use supporting documents/references to support your answers.
Comments from professor: We begin this week with an analysis of ethical and legal issues in the Electropic LLC case.
Let me give you some specific advice on addressing this case in Project 3. You must use the Badaracco framework. After reviewing all the material, take Badaracco’s ethical analysis and address his four questions and his three tests. The questions should be applied to different possible situations. For example, the company could terminate June, could allow her to keep her promotion, or could demote her but allow her to keep a job of some kind. So, the important thing is do the complete analysis and particularly not jump to an early conclusion. I am not interested in what your common sense says – I am interested in the analysis of the questions and tests that Badaracco raises as applied to different factual patterns. So you would go through each question one by one.
