CASE STUDY: SIGNED OR ANONYMOUS

After graduation, you obtain a job as a manager with a software company that has several stores in the state. After a year of outstanding service, you are honored to be assigned a position on the companys ethics committee. The company provides an ethics hotline link on its internal website. Employees electronically submit ethical concerns they may have and include their name and email address. The submission is then assigned to a committee member for clarification or investigation. The only people who see the submitters name are the committee chair and the committee member assigned to investigate the concern. The committee decided that a submitters name should be included on submissions to encourage individuals to first address the issue with the person associated with the problem before reporting it to the ethics committee and discourage employees from making anonymous false accusations.

An employee invites you to lunch and confidentially shares a concern she has about her manager misusing his business credit card for personal purchases. You suggest that the employee formally submit the concern through the ethics hotline. The employee refuses to because she fears it will ruin her career at the company. You note that the company has policies against retaliation, and there are federal and state whistleblowing laws that protect whistleblowers from retaliation. By then my manager would already have mad my life miserable, she tells you. You ask if she would submit the concern if the ethics hotline submissions were anonymous. She says most likely.

At the next ethics committee meeting, you raise the issue of whether submissions to the ethics hotline should be signed or anonymous. Some members argue for the anonymous system to encourage more submissions. Other members favor keeping the current signed system to make sure that issues are first dealt with one-on-one before the ethics committee and avoid abuse. After 20 minutes of discussion, a committee member calls for a vote.

You have three options:

1. Vote in favor of keeping ethics hotline submission system

2. Vote in favor of adapting anonymous ethics hotline submission system

3. Something else (if so, what?)

Question 1. Which option would you choose and why is this the right option to choose?

Question 2. What are the ethics underlying your decision for question 1? To answer this question (b), please use at least three ethical frameworks out of six ethical frameworks (i.e., three teleological and three deontological frameworks) to justify your decision and provide rationales for the decision.