Question

Who cares about personal integrity in business ethics? It has become something of an institution for you to go out drinking with friends on Friday night. However, on this particular Friday night, you not feeling so great. Yes, you are holding an expensive cocktail in your hand, with some of your best mates around, all very much up for a big night out. Your best friend from college, Peter, will be arriving any minute now. You are a regional marketing director of Advance CHEM Pharmaceutical (ACP), one of the biggest pharmaceutical and chemical companies in the world. You pull a big salary since working in ACP five years ago. Joining ACP has brought you a successful career and a very heathy bank balance. It has also turned you into quite a successful player in the stock market because ACP paid you a large chunk of annual bonuses in stock options. Even with a dipping market, this has proved to be an extremely lucrative package, given your success in meeting all the sales targets since you joined the company. However, this week in the office has been a nightmare. Special meetings have been called by the board of directors for all the senior managers and you were one of them. At the meeting, it was announced that scientists in a leading research lab of a reputable university has discovered some potentially lethal side-effects of one of ACP’s best-selling drugs. The report is confidential to the board of ACP, but an article containing the unfavourable research findings is going to be published in a renowned science magazine on Thursday next week. The purpose of the meeting was to inform you and the other senior managers of the research findings and to discuss possible strategies to contain bad news in risk disclosure and to tackle the problem. You and the other senior managers are explicitly reminded by the board in the meeting to stay absolutely silent about the research findings, particularly as the likelihood is that this would turn out to be a major news story. The board trusted the senior managers and their integrity to seek solutions together. Knowing about this makes you extremely uneasy because, You are certain that this information will have a major effect on the share price of ACP. There is a high possibility the news would trigger a chain of court cases and huge damage claims both from the government and the private sectors. After digesting the news in the last few days, you have made up your mind to sell all your shares of ACP first thing next Monday – as also certain that there will be a steep fall in the value of the stock once the news is out. Your best friend Peter, who works as a senior manager for a major investment bank, is also going to be badly affected by the news because, He has also invested heavily in ACP himself due to the good performance of the company in the last few years. He has also advised many of his clients – among them managers of major funds – to invest in ACP. You are extremely uneasy about what to do. Peter is your best friend, you want to help him. You know he will hear the news soon anyway and may be given his personal connections, even before next Thursday. If you share the information with him now, you are certain that he will sell his own shares like you do (which you really would not mind). However, as his work performance rest in his respectable investment advice to his clients, you are almost sure that he would also advise his clients to sell. The effect to the share price even before the publication of the article next Thursday could be substantial.

Use the lens of ALL relevant normative and descriptive theories to discuss how the situations of right and wrong could be addressed? (18 marks)

What would you ultimately decide to do and why? (4 Marks)

Answer 1

Personal Integrity in a work place: It is an essential ingredient in being an ethical person.To have integrity is to do what you think is right regardless of consequences attached with your decision .

In present situation of ACP : There is possibility that our company may face the negative impact on share of company due to revealing of side effects of best selling drugs.

Being a senior manager of ACP i should focus more on the company performance and try to handle consequences which may be possible after revealing of this article containing side effects of drugs.

I should not think about sharing of shares of ACP .Infact I should handle the problem and stay with the ACP in its week tenure and focus more on the impacts of article.

If i decided to sell the shares of the company , I should maintain confidentiality and should not desribe the internal matters to outsiders ,this will be a kind of leak of confidential information .So I should not disclose the information to anyone even if he is my friend peter.This is against the personal ethics.and i should not disclose this information to anyone outsider even if they are my relatives or the loving one.Infact we should continously focus on betterment of ACP.so that other also not share information because of that they sell share.

here is a high possibility the news would trigger a chain of court cases and huge damage claims both from the government and the private sectors hence we should need to take care of this kind of situation together.

We should take care of personal ethics in this situation and maintain the confidentiality throughout the period.