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An Ethical Dilemma
The Effects of Personal and Professional Relationships

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Kayla A. Eidson
University of Maryland University College

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Ethics in business is a very wide range topic that is being practiced everyday; from a university firing a lecturer because of a high profile situation to a popular e-book selling company dealing with how they handle employee resignations (Business Ethics in the News,
2014) Many problems and situations arise from being in the workplace where not everyone wins and sometimes nobody wins. But every employee in America has some form of ethics training in order to help maintain a healthy working environment which will help each individual grow in their career and in their personal and professional relationships. Sometimes, a situation will arise where the solution could help the business but negatively affect the individuals involved. This paper will illustrate a particular dilemma that involves two employees who are neighbors but face a situation that people deal with on a daily basis in companies everywhere.
A Human Resources employee, Jan, is faced with a difficult predicament of integrity to her business and her friendship with her neighbor, Steve, that works in the same company in accounting. Steve is unaware of a location change in the company and has just put down a deposit on a home with his wife. He is a new employee (thanks to Jan for guiding him to this job opportunity) and Jan is aware that because of seniority in the company, his job is quite possibly on the line. In this situation, Jan’s personal beliefs gets in the way of her duties as Human
Resources. If there is any type of privacy policy in place with leadership, her job could also be on the line for telling her neighbor about the company move. She is also aware that the leadership will be announcing this news in a few weeks but that might be too late for Steve. In this case, she needs to keep her integrity in check to her company and unfortunately not tell
Steve the bad news. Jan might be unaware of the way the news will be delivered to the employees and the informal or formal proceedings with the people being let go that will occur.

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What she might also be unaware of is a possible severance package that might be available to employees like Steve who will not be making the move. There are some companies, Amazon in particular, that pay their employees to quit there jobs (Business Ethics in the News, 2014) It is up to Jan to understand that appropriate ethics trumps her friendship with Steve and she needs to let leadership handle their employees.
Relationships of any kind and basic human emotions contribute a great deal when dealing with business ethics. In particular, situations involving employees families, medical issues, fraternizing or any unprofessional behavior is a big factor when it comes to making decisions and overall behavior of a companies workforce. As outlined in the case of SJSU’s termination of a professor, the way the university handled the situation in turn grew questions involving the professors relationship with a student and if the sexual assault that occurred was handled ethically (Business Ethics in the News, 2014) When faced with an ethical decision, any employee that is faced with the situation at hand should learn all of the facts before the decision is made. In any case, the decisions come from the top ultimately sometimes despite what lower level employees have to say about the situation. In the case of Amazon paying their employees to quit their jobs, it was an ethical decision from the top in order to mitigate employees that don’t even want to be there to work for them that could possibly contaminate the healthy work environment (Business Ethics in the News,