What must an organization consider from an ethical and socially responsible perspective before deciding to expand operations in other

countries? How might an organization be considered ethical and socially responsible in its home country but not in the new country where they expanded operations? How might an organization balance varying views of ethical standards across cultures? Provide an example of a business currently addressing this issue and discuss any personal experience you may have with these issues.

Consider the following scenario: Your office has been purchased by a foreign company. You have been asked to head their office in that other country for a period of at least 2 years and your immediate family members (spouse and children) can accompany you. You will have 'deputy director' that speaks English very well to help bridge the language barrier. What issues should you consider before taking this assignment? How will you react if there are issues within your office that you are morally against? Will your ethical framework allow you to take part in culture events for business purposes, that you are morally opposed to ? What is your ethical analysis if you find that your company employs sweatshops for portions of their labor pool?

Smart Compact, Inc. is a green, smart car engineering company, located outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 60 to 80 permanent employees and contracted employees comprise the total workforce at any given time. Employee's work and relate together when building prototypes on the workshop floor, designing and planning in the warehouse offices, marketing and running international business affairs, administrating, and governing the workforce. In this diverse environment, many personality types and educational backgrounds come together and conduct business within the same organizational culture. The leadership of Smart Compact, Inc. has adopted the US Sentencing Commission's recommended guidelines, in which ethical rules and expected employee behavior is woven into the

fabric of the organization's policies, formal, and informal cultures. Smart Compact, Inc. has hired an Ethics Officer who reports directly to leadership. The Ethics Officer shapes policies, such as a code of ethics that promotes fairness, equal treatment, and appropriate disciplinary measures. Leadership has made a point to echo the code of ethics in trainings and appropriate employee materials. The job of the Ethics Committee is to monitor and take metrics of the effectiveness of policies and incident resolutions. The company trains managers to be confident when dealing with employees when ethical issues arise. With a comprehensive ethical policy approach, leadership is confident that ethical and moral concerns will be addressed appropriately by all employees. Smart Compact, Inc. has many concerns about morals and ethical issues. One of the biggest goals is to keep employee relationships focused on work and not on relational distractions that can affect productivity. The company has put policies in place that create a safe and respectful environment in which employees may focus on the work at hand. Harassment occurs when one employee is bothering another employee whether it is physical or verbal. Harassment has different degrees of severity and Smart Compact, Inc. realizes that regardless of the severity of the harassment the outcome is unhappy employees, which means less productiveness and the possibility of the law becoming involved. Smart Compact, Inc. has implemented several rules and guidelines to help avoid such instances but knows they will occur. When they do occur, training managers will be ready to handle the situations confidently, with a focus on ethical behavior. When employees encounter ethical issues, there are tools in place that employees can confidentially report such crimes, and includes a third party help line. Developing a helpline gives employees a sense of security he or she may need if there are illegal activities occurring in the organization. Smart Compact, Inc. recently faced issues such as bribery as it ventures into business in foreign markets. Management understands the law allows bribery in some countries, but policy clearly states that there will be no such behavior in this company. This has caused Smart Compact, Inc. to lose business because of government officials expecting payment in exchange for approval to gain customers in the country. We are currently facing both losing business in one country and gaining business in another country. In Great Britain, a bribery incident involved a government official. The president of the Great Britain office denied the official any form of payment that resulted in a difficult environment to conduct business. In Kenya, an official proposed that Smart Compact, Inc. pay a fee of $20,000 to the government in exchange for a few contracts in which the potential sales are worth one million dollars. Although bribery is legal in Kenya, bribery is still against the company's internal policies. Smart Compact, Inc. has a Corporate Ethics Officer and Ethics Committee to serve as a resource in which the employees can go in confidence to ask questions about his or her decisions. If managers have any concerns about other employee's behavior, he or she can also go here and express his or her concerns. The legal department has the responsibility to provide honest answers. The company reinforces ethics by using a reward system and surveys to monitor any areas that may need more attention. When an ethical issue comes up the HR department will follow eight steps to ensure the proper decision is made: Gather the Facts, Define the Ethical Issues, Identify the Effected Parties, Identify Consequences, Identify Obligations, Consider Character and Integrity, Think Creatively about Potential Actions, and Check Your Gut (Trevino & Nelson, 2006). By following the eight steps, Ethics Officers ensure the best decisions are made. Smart Compact, Inc. is very strict about the code of ethics the company has set forth upon the employees, customers, and corporation. As previously seen, the company is willing to give up one million dollars in sales to avoid paying Kenya's government to have a stake in the country. Profits are not the company's main exported value, how the company trades its

values to other markets is the company's focus. The company's formal code of ethics is as follows: Smart Compact, Inc. has the determination to do business with the premier expectations of the code of ethics. The code of ethics is set forth for every employee, including executive leadership, to ensure each individual provides good faith toward others inside the organization as well as corporate activities. The organizations core ethical values of integrity, responsibility, equality, and fairness are practiced throughout the company. According to the code of ethics, all employees including the executive officers must follow the ethics stated in the handbook. To ensure all employees know the ethical code, all employees must not only receive the code of ethics handbook, but also read, test, and pass as well as sign off confirming the employee accepts the code of ethics. To ensure all employees receive the code of ethics handbook, the new employee must receive the handbook during the time when an employee are filing I-9's, W-2's, and all other required legal paperwork. Once the new employee receives the code of ethics handbook, the employee must take a test for the code of ethics two weeks after receiving the handbook. If the person takes the code of ethics exam and does not pass with a 90% or higher, the employee must attend the next continual education of ethics class that all employees are required to completed after four years of service. As valuable as it is for an automobile manufacture to have the code of ethics, there will be rewards set in place for Smart Car Inc on a case-by-case basis. The automobile industry does have an undeserved reputation concerning business and customer relationships. To avoid these stereotypes, the company must refine the standard for the automotive industry. To ensure employees will be quality employees for Smart Compact, Inc., the platform of ethics must set forth during the recruiting and interviewing stage. This would have to be the hardest segment of truth and reliability, as "most people cannot tell from demeanor whether someone is lying or telling the truth - but most people think they can" (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2010). During the recruiting process, Smart Car must ask questions that relate to the companies code of ethics as well as to the company's business plan for future growth. Although the majority of the interview has a drilling segment of the company's ethics, to instill the mythology, there will be a test of the company's code of ethics. The test of the company's code of ethics is required by all employees. However, employees with authority such as managers, directors, executives must attend a well-organized class that entails more than the surface of the code of ethics. The company is currently expanding into other markets across the globe and the training teaches executives that paying the Kenyan government $20,000 to obtain a million dollars in sales is unethical and intolerable. To ensure this does not happen on any level, all employees must attend a continual education class for the code of ethics every four years. To ensure all employees attend training as set forth in the policy, audits will be conducted on an annual basis. Monitoring ethics at Smart Compact, Inc is the job of internal policy auditors. Internal policy auditors consist of the Ethics Committee, chaired by the Corporate Ethics Officer. Every four years, the Ethics Committee analyzes the policies and decisions of the organization through ethical lenses. To ensure policies are successfully integrated to the cultures of the company, the committee surveys, interview's staff, and measures the formal and informal culture. After the committee analyzes complex cultural data, the committee diagnoses the ethical and unethical behaviors in which policy and training should focus. An example of a policy instated from the diagnosis method was the whistle blowers hotline. Brian Martin defines whistle blowing as, " an open disclosure about significant wrongdoing made by a concerned citizen totally predominantly motivated by notions of public interest, who has perceived the wrongdoing in a particular role and initiates the disclosure of her of his own free will, to a person or

agency capable of investigating the complaint and facilitating the correction of wrongdoing" (Verschoor, 2005, p. 22). Smart Cars, Inc has mandated the hotline will be confidential, and employees are to call whenever they witness or know of behavior or incidents that are against company policy, or against the law. The hotline sends a message to employees that individual morality may be exercised, under confidentiality, with no repercussions, and help the company improve. The Ethics Committee sanitizes policy of emotional and charged words that may convey a counter-personal ethical message. Making ethics universal and behavior centered is the goal of the policies. Discussing personal morality and lawful situations in the workplace is the job of the various ethics training opportunities in which staff may communicate personal ethics to each other in a safe non-personal environment. Every four years the Ethics Committee makes certain considerations in policy change that change the formal and informal cultures of Smart Compact, Inc. The committee considers how a policy change will affect the multiple cultures. The committee implements each policy change with the view of the policy affects over the long term. The committee implements policies that do not seek to control behavior, but allow "good" employees to meet the policy expectations. For employees who do not act appropriately, or need education in their ethical behaviors, the committee also considers policies in discipline. Smart Cars, Inc has written guidelines that inform managers how to implement and enforce ethical policy. Policies seek to inform and govern formal and informal cultures as well as employees. Many channels of communication convey ethical and policy education to employees. Websites take employees through simulations and scenarios whereby employees certify in ethical policy acumen. Constituent and sales trainings use workgroups in which employees may speak safely about personal ethics as compared to organizational ethical stances, and each other's ethical stances. New employees of Smart Cars, Inc receive the latest code of conduct within handbooks as well as web training and certification in those items. Managers attend live trainings providing an integrative cultural experience. Managers attend live training sessions focusing past employee cultural experiences, observed and taken from the Ethics Committee measurements. The training uses role acting and other techniques whereby managers use policy and values approaches to solve ethical dilemmas. From the training, managers build confidence in enforcing ethical policy. Managers enforce ethical policies through values approaches and equal discipline. In the values approach, policies emphasize expected behavior. The highest business standards guide written policies. Managers communicate often, and exemplify high standards. Disciplinary action is swift as a habit of the organizational culture. If an employee is falling behind in objectives or performance managers are to engage the employee proactively, immediately, and privately. Managers must not only keep detailed documentation of incidents, but also discipline as harsh as appropriately dictated by policy and equal treatment guidelines. If termination is the ultimate corrective action, managers take steps to make the termination as comfortable as possible for the employee. Managers gather any written records of performance or complaints. They prepare a brief statement that informs the employee of the exact reasons for the termination. Smart Cars, Inc contracts with outplacement counselors to meet with an employee at the time of termination. Employees meet face-to-face with managers. Most important, managers must keep terminations private to respect the employee. At Smart Compact, Inc., comprehensively inserting ethical policy into the organizational culture is the best approach to create a fair and diverse work environment. Employees come together and produce in formal and informal cultures. Feedback in monitoring shows that employees believe it is comforting that the policy aim of Smart Compact, Inc. is to create an organizational culture of fairness and respect.

Managers trained in ethical issues are confident when appraising and assessing employee behaviors. Tools such as whistle-blowing send a message that individual morality is acceptable to mix with the organizational cultural expectations. The company has found that codes of ethics and conduct are most effective when used for local and international business. At Smart Compact, Inc, ethics are front and center in leading the way to a successful productive enterprise. References Trevino, L. & Nelson K., (2007). Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How To Do It Right (4th ed.), Wliey, Hoboken, NJ Verschoor, C. (2005). To blow the whistle or not is a tough decision! Strategic Finance, 87(4), 21-22. Retrieved March 12, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global, (Document ID: 911491241). W. W. Norton and Comapny, Inc. (2010). Telling Lies. Retrieved from http://staging.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4469