Mgt301A Sustainability | Ethical Issues Assessment Answers

Answer:

Introduction:

The aim of this report is to discuss the ethical issues created in an international company named Euro Car Parts. The unethical issues that has been understood that as Euro Car Parts has started to spread its business in the Australian market for the first time, there has been issues regarding discrimination on the basis of race and gender within the employees. This report will be however discussing the stakeholders’ theory to understand various issues emerging in this company. Towards the end this report will be discussing three solutions to these problems recommend steps to eliminate such problems in the organisation.

Summary of scenario:

Euro Car Parts is an UK based company which has been working in that country for a long time. It has branches in that country in more than 200 places with no unethical record found yet. This particular company has entered the Australian market and has been doing business founding local offices where the employees both local as well as expatriates have been assisting the company to reach its organizational goals. The local employees as do not have much experience are not given higher posts hence they have been employed in the lower posts and the employees from the head office occupied the higher posts. This created issues in the organization as these expatriates have no experience in working with the cross-cultural teams. Therefore, the team leaders are found to be discriminating the aboriginal employees of the organization and depriving them from all the opportunities and scopes of development. In addition to this, the victims of the discrimination are found to be affected from the company policies and their team leaders are not responding to their wants and needs. They are not being able to get trained to utilise their personal skills. On the other hand the women employees of this particular firm are claiming that they are also facing this type of discriminative problems from them higher authorities. They are being mentally tormented and verbally harassed.

Stakeholder theory:

This theory is the theory of organizational management and ethics which address morals and values of the organization in the managing of business ethics. This theory identifies as well as models the group of stakeholders of the organization (Jensen, 2017). This theory also describes and recommends various methods through which the management can effectively serve the interests of their stakeholders. In one word, stakeholder theory attempts to address the principles of what or who actually count for the company. The stakeholders’ perspectives are the most traditional view of the companies. To this view, the only the shareholders and owners are the most important and whatever the company does, aim to serve the interest of the owner and shareholders (Jones, Wicks, & Freeman, 2017). However, this scenario has drastically changed with time. In this recent era, the company is bound the make decision in favour of the customers, employees, commuters, financers, suppliers, government bodies and most importantly the trade unions associated with the company (Hörisch, Freeman, & Schaltegger, 2014). In some cases the competitors are also grated to be one important stakeholder as this gives the company fresh impetus to operate successfully in the business. In this case however, the employees of Euro Car Parts are the chief stakeholders for serving whom the company needs to focus on elimination the discrimination issue.

Analysis:

In this case of Euro Car Parts, the key stake holders are the employees of the firm. They are the second level of priority stakeholders. The particular group is interested in their career development, equivalent opportunities, equal treatment and high wages. These stakeholders are motivated to develop their own skills by working in such a reputed international company (Andriof, Waddock, Husted, & Rahman, 2017). This is the reason why the company’s Australian branch should consider them to enhance productivity, reputation and understanding the new market. However, as they are being harassed by their colleagues in the workplace, hence they need the proper information regarding the policies of discrimination. (See figure 1).

Figure 1.

The main interest area of the employees is job satisfaction, job security, salary and motivation (Ngo, 2017). They have the power to manipulate the policies of the organisation. These employees when do not get the opportunity to develop their skills and efficiency, they react. In this case of Euro Car Parts, the employees are facing harassments which are affecting the production quality of the company and many employees are leaving due to this reason. This is due to the fact that the employees are facing issues regarding the discrimination issues in the workplace. In mitigating these issues, the company must engage in the interest area as the company will be needing to invest more if it does not employ the local people (Kosny, Santos, & Reid, 2017). Therefore, these employees need to get ample power in their hands to effectively support the production (Jones, Peddie, Gilrane, King, & Gray, 2016). This is the reason why the company needs to prioritise these stakeholders over others and mitigate the issue as soon as possible.

Identification of alternative solutions:

` For preventing any further problems of discrimination, the company can take three very important measures. These are-

• Proper documentation and taking immediate action to the immoral employees
• Proper training to the employees
• Reducing the cultural diversity in the workplace

The company needs to employ a team to properly document all the versions from both the victims as well as the accused. This is the initial process to keep every details and up to date records. This process will be helping the management to answer question from the other stakeholders. The time, place name of the employees associated in the harassment incident will be noted (Davis, Whitman, & Nadal, 2015). Based on this documentation of the incidents, the employees will be found guilty and directly terminated from the workplace be they be most important or productive employees of the firm.

The company must take mandatory action to train the interviewers who will recruit the employees, the managers and all the employees about the discrimination laws of the country. These laws may include disability act, age discrimination act, medical leave act, equal pay act, pregnancy discrimination act and civil rights act (Ruggs, Martinez, Hebl, & Law, 2015). This will help to build an efficient workplace without any incident of discrimination and associated problems. Thirdly the company can reduce the recruitment of the aboriginal people of Australia because of which all these issues have been emerged in the workplace. However, this may not be very good aspect to maintain a company’s reputation as this will also go against the discrimination act of the country (Cheung, King, Lindsey, & Membere, 2016).

Recommendations

In order to solve this issue of discrimination, the company need to build discrimination policies attacking racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. The employee hand book must carry the definitions of the harassment and discrimination issues originated from them. The employees must know the consequences to violate any of the company’s policies. This is very important to take all the complaints strictly so that the employees in the firm do not feel the workplace unsecured for working. By treating all the employees in a similar manner in the aspect of racial and gender discrimination, the company will be able to eliminate all the problems and build a strong and productive workplace.

Conclusion:

Therefore, it can be concluded that the international company like Euro Car Parts does not have any experience in working in a diverse work culture like that of Australia. Hence there are some issues regarding discrimination and harassment of the aboriginal employees and women in the organization. However, through stakeholder theory and its analysis the prioritisation has been done and based on this analysis, three solutions have been given. The company immediately needs to form a strong policy backed by the Australian laws, in order to prevent discrimination in the company’s Australian branch.

Bibliography

Andriof, J., Waddock, S., Husted, B., & Rahman, S. (2017). Jensen’s approach to stakeholder theory. In Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking. Routledge.

Cheung, H. K., King, E., Lindsey, A., & Membere, A. (2016). Understanding and reducing workplace discrimination. In Research in personnel and human resources management. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Davis, L., Whitman, C., & Nadal, K. (2015). Microaggressions in the workplace: Recommendations for best practice. Sexual harassment in education and work settings,. 

Hörisch, J., Freeman, R. E., & Schaltegger, S. (2014). Applying stakeholder theory in sustainability management: Links, similarities, dissimilarities, and a conceptual framework. Organization & EnvironmenT , 27 (4), 328-346.

Jensen, M. C. (2017). Value maximisation, stakeholder theory and the corporate objective function.In Unfolding stakeholder thinking. Routledge.

Jones, K. P., Peddie, C. I., Gilrane, V. L., King, E. B., & Gray, A. L. (2016). Not so subtle: A meta-analytic investigation of the correlates of subtle and overt discrimination. Journal of Management , 42 (6), 1588-1613.

Jones, T. M., Wicks, A. C., & Freeman, R. E. (2017). Stakeholder theory: The state of the art. The Blackwell guide to business ethics , 17-37.

Kosny, A., Santos, I., & Reid, A. (2017). Employment in a “land of opportunity?” Immigrants’ experiences of racism and discrimination in the Australian workplace. Journal of International Migration and Integration , 18 (2), 483-497.

Ngo, H. Y. (2017). Sociocultural adaptation, perceived workplace discrimination and psychological well-being of immigrant workers. In Migration in Post-Colonial Hong Kong. Routledge.

Ruggs, E. N., Martinez, L. R., Hebl, M. R., & Law, C. L. (2015). Workplace “trans”-actions: How organizations, coworkers, and individual openness influence perceived gender identity discrimination. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity , 2 (4), 40