Chapter 4 Corporate Culture, Governance and Ethical Leadership
Chapter 4: Corporate Culture, Governance and Ethical Leadership
Review Questions
1. To help understand an organizational culture, think about some organization to
which you belong. Does your company or school or fraternity/sorority have its
own culture? How would you describe it? How does it influence individual
decision making and action? Would you be a different person had you attended a
different school or joined a different fraternity or sorority? How would you go
about changing your organization’s culture?
2. Consider how you evaluate whether a firm is “one of the good guys” or not. What
are some of the factors that you use to make this determination? Do you actually
know the facts behind each of those elements, or has your judgment been shaped
by the firm’s reputation? Identify one firm that you believe to be decent or ethical
and make a note of the bases for that conclusion. Next identify a second firm that
you do not believe to be ethical or with questionable values and write down the
bases for that conclusion. Now, using the Internet and other relevant sources,
explore the firms’ cultures and decisions, checking the results of your research
against your original impressions of the firms. Try to evaluate the cultures and
decisions of each firm as if you had no idea whether they were ethical. Were you
accurate in your impressions or do they need to be modified slightly?
3. Changing a corporate culture is very difficult. Imagine that you are asked by your
chief executive to help move your firm toward the use of a triple-bottom-line
accounting model in which environmental and social factors are given equal
weight to financial indicators. Assume that this would represent a major
transformation of the firm. How would you begin to set the stage for this
transition? What reasons would you use to support the change? How would you
change attitudes and values?
4. Now that you have an understanding of corporate culture and the variables that
impact it, how would you characterize an ethically effective culture, the one that
would effectively lead to a profitable and valuable long-term sustainability for the
firm?
5. One element that surely impacts a firm’s culture is its employee population.
While a corporate culture can shape an employee’s attitudes and habits, this will
be more easily done if people with those attitudes and habits already developed
are hired in the first place. How would you develop a recruitment and selection
process that would most successfully allow you to hire the best workers for your
particular culture? How would you, and should you, get rid of employees who do
not share the corporate culture?
6. What are the greatest benefits and deleterious costs of compliance-based cultures?
7. You are aware of inappropriate behavior and violations of your firm’s code of
conduct throughout your operation. In an effort to support a collegial and positive
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© 2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. This is proprietary material solely for authorized instructor use. Not authorized for sale or
distribution in any manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in
whole or part.
Chapter 4 Corporate Culture, Governance and Ethical Leadership
atmosphere, however, you do not encourage co-workers to report on their peers.
Unfortunately, you believe that you must make a shift in that area and need to
institute a mandatory reporting structure. How would you design the structure and
how would you implement the new program in such a way that the collegiality
that exists is not destroyed?
8. Put yourself in the position of someone who is establishing an organization from
the ground up. What type of leader would you want to be? How would you create
that image or perception? Do you create a mission statement for the firm, a code
of conduct? What process would you use to do so? Would you create an ethics
and/or compliance program and how would you then integrate the mission
statement and program throughout your organization? What do you anticipate
might be your successes and challenges?
Chapter Four – Corporate Culture, Governance and Ethical Leadership
Discussion Questions
1. From what you’ve just read, was Apple forthright and honest in its
public
statements? What facts lead you to this conclusion? What other
facts
would you want to know?
2. If Apple did not have a legal duty to disclose the facts of Jobs’s
health,
would it be ethical to issue misleading information?
3. What responsibilities does the Apple board of directors have to the
invest-
ing public? Do you think they ful’lled their responsibilities in this
case?
4. Who are the stakeholders with regard to Jobs’s health?
5. Does Jobs have a responsibility (ongoing? immediate?) to Apple’s
inves-
tors, board of directors, employees, and/or customers to inform
them
about his health?
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© 2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. This is proprietary material solely for authorized instructor use. Not authorized for sale or
distribution in any manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in
whole or part.