Here is your final project for BSAD 319 – Business Ethics

Congratulations, your team has just been called in as special consultants for a project that looks at cases
of potential business ethical misconduct. These are real cases with actual facts (basically, you will be
constructing your own case study). Your group will need to prepare a presentation that gives your
classmates the details of your case, and you will need to prepare a paper for me. Some things I will want
to see in the paper include:

1. Cover page – Should include your name, an interesting title for your training program, the date
and the course (BSAD 319).
2. Table of contents (hint, this means I expect there will be several pages)
3. Executive summary / Abstract – gives the general sense of the case and your findings. This
should be between ½ and ¾ of a page long. This goes on the first page after the Table of
Contents and is separate from the rest of the paper.
4. Topics –each one must be covered in order to receive full credit for this assignment.
a. Define the case: what happened, when did it happen, is it still happening, what is the
accusation, what are the important facts. You should not embellish on ideas here, just
stick to the facts.
b. From which ethical standpoint do you wish to analyze the case? We talked about a few
ethical theories in this class, you can use one of those or pick a different one. Define the
ethical foundation for me and say why it is appropriate to use here. Also, define roughly
what you would expect a result of “ethical” or “unethical” judgement to be. Don’t tell
me the result of the judgement yet, just what would merit ethical or unethical, so we
can compare it to your conclusions.
c. Define if your group thought the actions were ethical, unethical or if you can even break
it down to “action X was ethical, but action Y was not ethical” or “they were acting
ethically until X.” Offer support for why your group came to this conclusion(s).
d. Why was this case a potential for your ethical analysis? What made you pick this as a
possibility?
e. What was the role of different levels of leadership in this case? How did the (in)action of
leadership give rise to the ethical situation?
f. What institutional factors played a role in this situation?
g. What environmental (not environment like nature, but like industry, regulations,
society, etc.) factors played a role in this situation?
h. If you decided if they were ethical: how could this be used to help teach other
companies. If you decided they were unethical: what could they have done differently in
concrete terms that are realistic, also who should be punished and what should the
punishments be?
5. References for your material. Your book is a great place to start, but it is not the only source. In
fact, there are literally thousands of sources out there. Be sure to put some effort into looking
them up as they can be of great value.
Some ideas for your consideration: Dakota Pipeline, Wells Fargo (or other banks) opening secret
accounts, the water company in Flint, Michigan, Freedom Industries, car industry companies and
emissions reports (VW, Volvo, Nissan, Fiat, etc.), Samsung Galaxy Note 7. There are countless others to
pick from, just be sure it was something in the past 5 years and it wasn’t covered in class already.

Specifics for this project:

Manual – The manual should be done in Calibri 11 pt. font with 1,5 spacing between lines. The paper
should be 2,000 word minimum, not including references, abstract/executive summary and front page
material. It should be left justified and block paragraph (not indented for each beginning paragraph).
Sections should be clearly numbered, labeled and separated from previous sections. Each page should
also be numbered at the bottom of the page. In the header for each page, you should include your name
and the course number/title). Each topic (4.a. – 4.h.) must be covered. You do not have to break down
each topic as a section, though I should be able to easily recognize that you have indeed included a
topic. You may be more detailed than I have listed, these are just the minimums for a passing grade. You
are encouraged to use pictures or article clippings if you think it will help your case. You should submit
this as a Word (or open office “word”) file; PDFs can also be submitted but will be considered extra.

Slides – You are free to be creative with these. Remember, I will award more points for a slide
presentation that is professional. The slides should cover at least a synopsis of the case, what ethical
framework your group used, the verdict from your group, who was involved and information from topic
h. Again, this is the baseline, not what is required for a high mark. You may have to trade off information
for time restraints.

When you upload your work to LMS, I suggest that you put all of your files in a zipped file and upload the
zipped file. This is the easiest way to ensure that the system doesn’t have problems because of multiple
files.