Chapter 10 – Moral Choices Facing Employees
1. According to the traditional law of agency, which statement is true?
law of agency is not legal concept but a moral standard of loyalty that employees today seldom follow.
employees are under a legal obligation to act loyally and in good faith and to carry out lawful instructions.
an employee’s work contract is irrelevant to his or her moral obligations for legal reasons.
no moral value is more important than loyalty, whether to a person or an organization.
2. According to the Supreme Court
even if you are not an insider, you can be guilty of insider trading if you misappropriate sensitive information.
anyone buying/selling stock based on nonpublic information is guilty of inside trading.
insider trading violates the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.
it should be left up to the company, not the government, to decide whether or not to prohibit insider trading.
have become less frequent today.
always involve personal financial gain.
are morally worrisome only when the employee acts to the detriment of the company.
occur when employees’ have special or private interests that are substantial enough to interfere with their job
duties.
is legally equivalent to a patent or copyright.
need not be treated confidentially by the company in order to be protected.
can be almost any information not generally known if it is valuable to its possessor and treated confidentially.
is a narrow, precise concept that the law defines in great detail.
5. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
doesn’t apply to countries where bribery is common.
makes no distinction between bribery and extortion.
provides stiff fines but not prison sentences for corporate officials engaging in bribery overseas.
outlaws “grease payments”.