Ethics of Team Work

1. Ethics of Team Work William J. Frey College of Business Administration University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez

2. Why Team Work? • AACSB accreditation standards place emphasis on teaching skills relevant to team work • Companies that recruit at UPRM place the ability to work effectively on teams at top of list of required skills • Companies are changing their organizational structures and placing more responsibility on relatively autonomous work groups • See Davis on the Hitachi Report in Thinking Like an Engineer

3. What you will do • You will be divided into teams of 4 or 5 individuals • Each team will held responsible as… • A learning team • Carrying out group activities inside class • Preparing STS descriptions and Decision Point analyses on the cases used in class • Developing an ethics program for an assigned corporation as a CECO (corporate ethics compliance officer) • For these tasks each group will be assigned a grade which will be distributed to each individual unless there is evidence that someone attempted to free ride on group work

4. What you will do in this module • Develop, in class, a preliminary group self-evaluation that… • Identifies key group values and outlines strategies for realizing them in group work • Outlines strategies for avoiding the key pitfalls of group work • Carries out a mid-semester audit that describes obstacles to group work and evaluates value and pitfall strategies on how effectively they respond to obstacles • As a final exam project, each group review values and strategies in light of work this semester. • Strategies are honestly assessed in terms of how they worked in the fact of obstacles • Participants outline the lessons they have learned that can be carried beyond class to help them in group work in the future

5. Values • A value “refers to a claim about what is worthwhile, what is good. A value is a single word or phrase that identifies something as being desirable for human beings.” • Brincat and Wike, Morality and the Professional Life: Values at Work • Values outline key goods that we seek to realize in our actions and policies • Moral and Non-moral values • Justice and efficiency

6. Reasonableness • Defusing disagreement and resolving conflicts through integration. • (1) seeking relevant information, (2) listening and responding thoughtfully to others, (3) being open to new ideas, (4) giving reasons for views held, and (5) acknowledging mistakes and misunderstandings • Pritchard, Reasonable Children, p. 11 • What will you do as a group to ensure that your discussion, debates, and decisions as a group will realize the value of reasonableness?

7. Respect • According to Kant, respect involves treating others as ends and never merely as means • Recognizing and working not to circumvent the capacity of autonomy in each individual. Characteristics including honoring rights such as free and informed consent, privacy, property, free speech, due process, and participation. • Disrespect circumscribes autonomy (and respect) by means of deception, force, and manipulation • What will you and your group do to realize respect in relation to (1) your group members, (2) other groups and their members, and (3) your teacher? How will you respond when others fail to treat you with respect?

8. Justice • Giving to each what is due. • Distributive: fair distribution of benefits and burdens • Retributive: fair and impartial administration of punishments • Compensatory: fairly recompensing those who have been wrongfully harmed • How are you going to realize justice in your group? • Equal distribution of tasks? • How will you respond to those in your group who do not do their fair share? • Punishment as in the compliance mode • Support as in the integrity mode

9. Responsibility • Moral response to moral relevance • Includes sensitivity to the moral salience in a given situation • Includes the ability to respond relevantly and morally to this saliency (action, attitude, emotion) • How will you assign responsibilities for tasks within your group? • What will you do to hold one another accountable?

10. Trust • Solomon: The expectation of moral behavior from others • Urban-Walker: The expectation that others may be relied upon to behave in an acceptable and unthreatening manner (Moral Repair, 84) • How do you propose to go about gaining one another’s trust? What do you do to “repair” this moral relation if it has been broken? (What breaks trust?)

11. Integrity • Integrity may be a “meta-value” that refers to the relation between particular values. If these other values cohere to form an internally consistent and externally integral whole, then this manifests integrity. • How can group values conflict with one another? (Can justice conflict with friendship? How?) • What kind of pressures from the outside can threaten group cohesiveness and integrity? • How can a group maintain integrity in relation to external pressures without falling into groupthink?

12. What you need to do • Identify values that you wish to realize through your group activities this semester • Keep your list manageable. • Take the time to rethink and redefine these values as a group. They should have special meaning to you.

13. Thought Experiment • Marie becomes ill during the semester and misses several classes. • How can your group use this obstacle as an occasion to realize the values of responsibility and justice? • What, in these circumstances, are Maria’s responsibilities to the group? The group’s to Maria? The group to the teacher?

14. Thought Experiment • Two members of your group with especially strong personalities develop immediate and strong dislikes for one another. • In preparing for a class assignment, one individual insists on several group meetings outside of class. The other member says he is unable to attend these because he has other commitments. • On the day of the presentation, both have an argument and seem unable to focus for the presentation. • What values are at stake here? What can the group and its members do to bring about a value-realizing solution?

15. Thought Experiment • A group of four individuals turns in an essay. Two worked on the first part which is well prepared. The other two postponed the assignment until the last minute and plagiarized a large portion. The professor identifies the plagiarized part and holds the whole group responsible. The first two individuals who did their share disclaim responsibility? What do you think?

16. Thought Experiment • The biggest two value challenges to group work are free riders and crowded schedules. • Free riders seek to reap the benefits of a cooperative, collective activity without bearing any of the burdens or without, themselves, contributing to the work. • A group is unable to get together outside of class because of conflicting work schedules. When one member goes to class and gets an assignment, he is unable to contact the others by phone or email. (They never respond.) Group members frequently miss class so they fail to coordinate during this time. (Other classes and activities, apparently, take priority.) They grow resentful of one another and of the teacher who holds them responsible in spite of their problems coordinating. What is the problem? What can be done to resolve it?

17. Thought Experiment • A group consists four members from business administration. They all know one another and two are even dating. A fifth member comes from political science. The political science student was, essentially, an outlier. He went to a couple of group meetings outside of class but then stopped. He relayed to the professor that nothing was done at these meetings. They seemed more an occasion for the other members to socialize. He felt that his time would be better spent receiving an assignment from the group and doing it on his own. The other members resented his not going to meetings but did acknowledge that he carried out his commitments and did good work.