Individual Assignment (1700 words)

Date for Submission: 20th November 2013.

Submitting your work on Time: Extensions to assignment submission deadlines will be granted in exceptional cir cumstances only. The appropriate application for exemption form must be used along with supporting documentation (e.g. medical certificates).

Applications for extensions should be made directly to the Postgraduate School ( Amber Rockwell) in advance of the deadline. Applications for extensions received after the submissi on deadline will not be accepted.

Academic impropriety Dublin Business School penalises students who engage in academic impropriety (i. e. plagiarism, collusion and/or copying). Please refer to the section on what is referencing and why is it so important for further information. If you have any concerns about referencing, please refer to the library there ar e a number of resources available that will assist you. There are also library classes availab le to all students a schedule of topics is available on the library website.

Individual Assignment

Select ONE of the ethical dilemmas overleaf and answer the following questions.

1. Think about what you most value. (approximately 200 words)

2. Describe at least two courses of action you might take and state the pros and cons of each course. (approximately 1000 words)

3. What can you say or do that would be consistent with your personal values? (a pproximately 500 words)

Your answer must be supported by appropriate literature sources and be thoroughl y referenced. Your answer must not exceed 1700 words. Marks will be lost for any assignments s ubmitted that exceed the word count by 10%.

1. VOICING YOUR VALUES You re a trader who joined a large investment bank two years ago. Pat, one of your fellow traders, is well known on the Street for being a big risk taker and a big money maker for th e firm. Consequently, he is popular among your firm s senior management. You see him at a party one night and notice that he surreptitiously used cocaine several times. Several weeks lat er in the office, you notice that he seems exceptionally high-spirited and that his pupils are extreme ly dilated you know that both are signs of drug use. You re thinking of mentioning something about it to his managing director, Bob, when Pat makes a particularly impressive killing in the market fo r your firm s own account. Bob jokes that he doesn t know how Pat does it, but he doesn t care. However he is pulling this off, it s great for the firm, Bob laughs. You feel strongly that this i s a problem and that it places your firm at risk. You ve already raised the issue to Pat s manager, Bob, who ignored the issue. Do you raise it further? How can you voice your values in this case?

2. PEOPLE ISSUE Your division has formed a committee of employees to examine suggestions and cre ate a strategy for how to reward good employee ideas. The committee has five members, but you a re the only one who is a member of a minority group. You re pleased to be part of this effort sinc e appointments to committees such as this one are viewed generally as a positive reflection on job performance. At the first meeting, tasks are assigned, and all the other committee members think you should survey minority members for their input. Over the next few weeks, you discover that sev eral committee meetings have been held without your knowledge. When you ask why you weren t notif ied, two committee members tell you that survey information wasn t needed at the meetings a nd you d be notified when a general meeting was scheduled. When you visit one committee memb er in his office, you spot a report on the suggestion program that you ve never seen before. When you ask about it, he says it s just a draft he and two others have produced.

3. CONFLICT OF INTEREST ISSUE You ve just cemented a deal between a $100 million pension fund and Green Company, a large

regional money manager. You and your staff put in long hours and a lot of effort to close the deal and are feeling very good about it. As you and three of your direct reports are having lunch in a fancy restaurant to celebrate a promotion, the waiter brings you a phone. A senior acc ount executive from Green is calling and wants to buy you lunch in gratitude for all your efforts. I ll leave my credit card number with the restaurant owner, he says. You and your team have a great time on me .

4. CUSTOMER CONFIDENCE ISSUE You re working the breakfast shift at a fast-food restaurant when a delivery of mi lk, eggs, and other dairy products arrives. There s a story in the local newspaper about contaminated milk distributed by the dairy that delivers to your restaurant. Upon reading the article more clo sely, you discover that only a small portion of the dairy s milk is contaminated, and the newspaper lists the serial numbers of the affected containers. When you point out the article to your manager, he t ells you to forget it. If you think we ve got time to go through every carton of milk to check serial numbe rs, you re crazy, he says. The article says right here that the chances are minuscule that anyo ne has a contaminated carton. He also explains that he doesn t have the workers to check the milk, and what s more, destroying the milk would require him to buy emergency milk supplies at the retail price. So he tells you to get back to work and forget about the milk. He says, I d on t have the time or the money to worry about such minor details.

5. USE OF CORPORATE RESOURCES ISSUE You work for Red Company. You and a colleague, Pat Brown, are asked by your mana ger to attend a weeklong conference in Los Angeles. At least 25 other employees from Red Co. are attending, as well as many customers and competitors from other institutions. At the conferenc e, you attend every session and see many of the Red Co. people, but you never run into Pat. Al though you ve left several phone messages for her, her schedule doesn t appear to allow room for a me eting. However, when you get back to the office, the department secretary, who is coordinating e xpense reports, mentions to you that your dinner in L.A. must have been quite the affair. When y ou ask, what dinner? she describes a dinner with 20 customers and Red Co. employees that Pat pa id for at a posh L.A. restaurant. When you explain that you didn t attend, she shows you the e xpense report with your name listed as one of the attendees.

Marking Scheme

Marks will be allocated as follows:

Research 20%

evidence of sourcing and using academic sources to support your answer:

The extent to which you answered the questions asked: 30%

Demonstration of understanding of the issues and critical analysis: 30%

Presentation, (grammar spelling, word count etc.) and clarity 20%

What is Referencing and Why is it Necessary? Referencing is a standard method of acknowledging the sources of information you have consulted. Anything - words, figures, graphs, theories, ideas, facts - originating from ano ther source and used in your assignment must be referenced (i.e. acknowledged):

. To avoid plagiarism. . So that the reader can verify quotations.

Assignment example: You are writing an assignment about Communications in Organisations and you have c onsulted a book by Henry McClave, called Communications for Business . In this book you have f ound a quotation that you want to include in your assignment. You do that as follows:

The ability to communicate effectively is often cited as the key characteristic o f the successful manager or administrator (McClave, 1997: 1)

The following is an example of the bibliographic entry when using the Harvard Bu siness Style:

Year of publication Edition of publication Publishers Bibliography McClave, Henry. 1997. Communication for business. 2nd ed. Dublin. Gill and Macmi llan.

Author Title of publication Place of publication

What information do I need for proper referencing? . An acknowledgement within the body of your assignment should include the name of the author, the date of publication and the page numbers e.g. (Forde, 2001: 73 - 74) . . At this point, known as in-text referencing , you are only giving the reader the author, date of publication and page reference of the source. The full details should be incl uded in the bibliography.

Paraphrasing and quoting - what s the difference? Paraphrasing involves writing someone s ideas in your own words - not verbatim:

. Anderson (1987: 73 - 74) advances three arguments against the death penalty. H e contends that the death penalty is inhuman and no society that purports to be civilised c an condone it. It has never been proved that the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and, fu rthermore, many innocent people have died in vain for crimes committed by others. Quoting involves writing the exact words of the author directly from the book or journal:

. My arguments against the death penalty are three-fold. To do away with any huma n being is uncivilised and inhuman. There is no proof that the death penalty acts as a d eterrent to heinous criminal acts, and it is a documented fact that many innocent men and wo men have been wrongly sentenced for the crimes of others (Anderson, 1987: 73 - 74).

Writing a bibliography A bibliography is a list of books, journal articles, newspaper articles or any o ther printed or electronic resource referred to by an author. It normally requires the following informatio n, all of which can be found inside the book or on the library OPAC:

. . . . . .

Name of the author. Date of the publication or resource. Title of the publication or resource. Edition of the publication or resource. Place of publication or resource. Publisher.

Examples on how material should be entered in a bibliography:

Journal article In this example the volume of the journal (=14), issue number (=2), page numbers (=131 - 143) and date (=June 2003):

. Caldwell, Raymond. 2003. Models of agency change: a fourfold classification. B ritish Journal

of Management, 14. (2): 131 - 143, June 2003.

Note that the title of the journal is italicised and not the title of the articl e. Internet The important point to remember in this bibliographic note is to enter the date the website was accessed e.g. 19 February 2009:

. McKiernan, G. 1996. Project Aristotle: automated categorisation of Web resourc es. [Online]. Available: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/Aristotle.htm [19 February 2009].

Electronic database In this example the title of the journal in which the article has been published (Journal of Management Studies) is in italics. The name of the database and the article refe rence number (if any) should be given in square brackets:

. Roche, William K. 1999. In search of commitment-oriented human resource manage ment practices and the conditions that sustains them. Journal of management studies, 36 (5) 653 [Abstract in the InfoTrac database]. Electronic resources A number of premium subscription based electronic resources are available to Dub lin Business School students, both within the college network and through remote access, the resources include those listed below (Please check the library website for the full listing)

. EBSCO Academic Source Premier - a multi-disciplinary database providing full t ext for nearly 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,600 peer-reviewed titles. . EBSCO Business Source Premier - the industry s most used business research datab ase, providing full text for more than 2,300 journals, including full text for more t han 1,100 peerreviewed titles covering business areas such as marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. . Emerald Fulltext - premium business database with content aggregated from over 130 academic journals. . Financial Times (ft.com) - access to the Financial Times online . GAAP - accounting database, essential for professional accounting students. . Ireland.com - Irish paper of record. Provides daily business updates along wit h current affairs. . LexisNexis - a searchable archive of content from newspapers, magazines, legal documents and other printed sources. LexisNexis claims to be the "world s largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information" . Mad.co.uk - marketing and advertising database that provides a daily industry update. . PEP Web - a source of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles from the field of psychoanalysis. The database offers the full text of 20 principal psychoanalytic journals and

more than 40 classic psychoanalytic books dating as far back as 1920. . PsychArticles - full-text psychology database providing access to peer-reviewe d journals. . Swetswise - an electronic journal repository. . WARC - from the World Advertising and Research Centre, a key research tool for marketing students. . Westlaw - legal database, provides a comprehensive legal search tool covering all Irish legislation