Decision or Action of Moral Gravity Essay

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Decision or Action of Moral Gravity

There was a recent situation in which my internet service provider egregiously overstepped its boundaries and transgressed upon my service. In doing so, a specific member of this organization made a decision of moral gravity that resulted in action that is likely illegal as well as unethical. The crux of the situation is that while getting technical support for the installation of a new modem -- which was a 'forced' upgrade on the part of the service provider, which claimed that my internet outages were attributed to a modem I had that was approximately three years old -- the representative told me she was concerned that I was paying too high of a price for my service. She stated that she wanted to look into alternative plans that could potentially lower the price. I gave her permission to call me back the next day to discuss the issue; I never received a call from her the next day. However, when it came time to pay my next bill I noticed that it was significantly higher than my standard bill. When I called to find out why, I was told that shortly after getting my new modem installed, a representative from this service provider had added telephone service to my account (previously I only had the internet) which increased the bill by approximately $30 dollars. I had never given my permission for such a change to my account and was shocked to find out about it.

The principle stakeholder affected by this decision was me as a customer of this service provider. I am affected in a number of ways. The first is in regards to my service. Even though I have created a lengthy log of the representatives I have spoken to about this issue and this unauthorized service change, the service has yet to be changed back to what I had authorized (just the internet). The second way I have been affected is in regards to trust. If representatives of this company are willing to make unauthorized changes to my account in this instance, there is no way I can trust them again to not do so or make other unauthorized changes or utilize my account or information in other devious and/or illegal ways. The other stakeholder in this action of moral gravity is the service provider. Now that my confidence as a customer in this organization has been lost, it is in danger of losing my business. Moreover, the service provider is affected by this decision in the fact that I may have to contact a third party organization to attempt to rectify my account. Also, I have yet to pay the service provider for the past three months because it still has not rectified my account -- thus, it is losing revenue. Additionally, the service provider now realizes that it cannot trust its own employees to correctly do their jobs and not transgress moral grounds when dealing with the accounts of customers; it may need to dedicate resources to retraining its employees or perhaps devising more efficacious means to monitor them. Finally, the organization has to deal with the ramifications of my distrust of it -- which includes publishing my experience on various social media outlets and discouraging other friends and family from utilizing its bevy of services.

The right outcome in this situation would have been for the service provider's representative not to have changed my account. There are absolutely no circumstances in which unauthorized changes to an account are permitted, especially with an organization in which value-based decision making is prioritized and part of company culture (Urbany et al., 2008, p. 75). There does not appear to be any sort of benefit to the service provider for having such an account made; perhaps there was some benefit for the representative who made the change (in the form of commission, maybe). Furthermore, the right thing to do is to revert the change and continue the service that I had authorized, selected and, frankly, enjoyed. The wrong thing is for representatives from this service provider to make autonomous decisions about someone else's account. In talking to the several representatives I contacted after this moral decision, the vast majority of them stated they believed that the representative I spoke to about the modem was guilty of this transgression. Again, there is a possibility that she derived some personal benefit from this autonomous behavior which is morally unacceptable -- putting the needs of the individual over those of her organization and its customers.

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This sort of decision then is wrong because it is a clear conflict of interests in terms of ethics. On some occasions mangers and others have forsaken conventional ethics for the sake of competitive pressures (Ludwig and Longenecker, 1993, p. 265) -- such as if this employee had a quota of product or service sales to fulfill. As an employee for the service provider, this individual has a responsibility to adhere to its standards and protocols. For instance, I have to supply a fairly copious amount of information to representatives on the phone before they will let me do anything with my account. This representative and all representatives need to be held to these and stricter standards, simply because they have so much sensitive information at their disposal.

Again, it is equivocal as to what sort of ethical principles this particular representative was following since I have extremely limited information about the benefit derived from her action. In the event that she was in fact given commission for "selling" me another service, then she would have simply been motivated by avarice which is as ethically unacceptable as it is understandable. Still, there are other ethical principles that could have actuated this information. While on the phone with me she stated several times that she was 'concerned' about the price that I was paying for this particular service. It is not beyond the realms of reason, then, that she made this moral transgression because she thought that in doing so she was somehow creating benefit for me as a customer. Even if this were her motivation for this wrong, she still should have considered the fact that in attempting to perceive what she might have considered right, she went about doing so by violating my trust, that of the company she worked for, and engaging in dissolute and means to accomplish such a goal. From a moral perspective, the ends do not justify the means.

It is crucial to understand the sort of biases that this particular individual likely utilized to make her decision and engage in unethical, possibly illegal behavior. These biases include the fact that since she worked for this service provider, she somehow innately understands the sorts of products and services it offers. Additionally, that bias could very well include the belief that as a customer, I was somehow intrinsically ignorant about those services. In this respect, it is not improbably that this particular representative believed that she knew what was better than me better than I did, that since she controlled the mechanism of power and had the infrastructure of the entire organization at her disposal, that she could effectively tell me what to do. Furthermore, she likely assumed that in regards to this situation, that I would not know what to do myself to lower my expenses and that it was effectively up to her discretion to 'lead' me along, much like a shepherd does his or her sheep. Essentially, she had a mobilization of bias in which all the factors to ultimately affect her decision were in her favor. Subsequently, she likely believed that I was not needed for consultation or authority, since she had all the means of effecting her decision at her disposal.

There are a number of things that this representative's organization -- the service provider -- could have effected to have prevented her behavior. Firstly, it could have some sort of severe penalties for usurping a customer's authorization for such an occurrence. Suitable penalties include suspension without pay or termination, effectively immediately. Instead, the organization is effectively hiding this behavior (and thus tacitly condoning it) under conventional bureaucracy, claiming it does not know who made this change, and that it is engaged in some two months long investigation that has yet to yield either results, an update, or any form of communication on the part of the provider. In fact, it is extremely necessary to have penalties for ethical issues in the form of substantial punishment in order to curb this sort of behavior as soon as possible. The reality of the situation is that when employees are able to get away with such behavior, or hide behind some corporate obscurity in which they are never truly reprimanded for their actions, they are more likely to do it again and increase the likelihood of more substantive ramifications -- such as in the Pinto fire case in which a significant portion of….....

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