The organization for which you have been working for five years is suffering from a global recession. In response, it changes your compensation structure. Discuss the role of moral intensity, moral sensitivity, and situational influences in this context.


Moral intensity is the degree to which an issue demands application of ethical principles. In this situation, the organization is facing financial instability and needs your support, nevertheless, this is just one of the factors which contributes to the moral intensity of the issue. 

Moral sensitivity is a personal characteristic that enables people to recognize the presence of an ethical issue and determine its relative importance. Even after having worked for five years in the organization, it depends on you as a person, and also on the information that you have about the situation, higher moral sensitivity leads to higher empathy. 

Situational factors could be a pressure from top management, peer pressure, social pressure and family responsibilities, and your comfort zone within the organization. Based on these situational factors, you may choose to stay with the organization, accept the new compensation or look for work elsewhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is it possible to have a knowledge of what an organizational culture is before you become a part of the organization? How important is it for you to align yourself with your organizational culture?

Organizational culture is artifacts and shared values and assumptions. Artifacts may be observable before you become a part of the organization but the shared organizational values and assumptions are the intangibles and difficult to decipher before you become a part of it. It is important to align with the organizational culture because it represents the way things work in the organization. Organizational culture acts as the control system, the social glue and sense making. Any violation of what is shared by members of an organization is likely to create alienation for a new member.
Read more

“All decisions are ethical decisions.” Comment on this statement, particularly by referring to the concepts of moral intensity and moral sensitivity.

This sweeping statement is false. In other words, not all decisions are having equal right/wrong or good/bad dimensions. We are saying there is a threshold which defines ethical concern, and it is a function of moral intensity and moral sensitivity. For a decision to have an ethical dimension, i t has to have some moral intensity associated with it. Moral intensity is a characteristic of the situation. It refers to the degree to which an issue demands the application of ethical principles. “Who should be laid off?” would have high moral intensity. On the other hand, a decision to take an umbrella to work because it might rain has no moral intensity. This is because morally intense issues involve others in the society who may think the decision is good or evil, or the issue quickly affects people. Moral sensitivity refers to a characteristic of the decision maker, not the situation. Faced with the same issue, two decision makers may be more or less moral sensitive, depending on emp...
Read more

Administrative theorists concluded many decades ago that the most effective organizations have a narrow span of control. Yet today’s top-performing manufacturing firms have a wide span of control. Why is this possible? Under what circumstances, if any, should manufacturing firms have a narrow span of control?

There are at least two reasons why many organizations are moving toward flatter organizational structures with a wider span of control. First, flatter structures require less overhead -- there are fewer middle managers and more people directly involved in the production of goods and/or services. Second, flatter structures are consistent with the trend toward greater autonomy and employee involvement. Managers necessarily have a wide span of control in flatter structures, and they are unable to engage in close supervision. Instead, employees (and work teams) are given more freedom to make decisions without management review. A narrow span or control would be most appropriate with a workforce that is low skilled and made up of workers with a high power distance. In such cases, the close supervision and control would be less likely to be viewed as a lack of trust among workers.
Read more