Jameson Reid
Dr. Chuck Wainwright
Principles of Management
September 12, 2013

Ethical Situation When a friend needs help, it is typically a natural instinct to help them. It is in some ways an unspoken rule of friendship. Loyalty is really important in any relationship, but what does a person do when a friend asks you to do something that may be loyal to them but not to somebody else? This is exactly what happens in this situation. The line between loyalty to a friend and career can be a very tricky one to determine. If I were stuck in this dilemma, I would explain to my friend that covering their mistake is simply something I could not do. That is lying, and lying is something that I work really hard to avoid, even if it would better my own status. You could say that lying is something that I believe to be ethically wrong. In my experience, lying to somebody only makes things worse; it always catches up to a person.
Another ethical value that I have is to respect your authority. If I were to help a friend out by covering up something that they messed up, that would be going behind the back of the company I am working for as well as the people who I report to. When you begin a career with a company, they trust you to do your best work for the benefit of the company. Changing some numbers so that they appear normal can severely hurt a company’s financial state and reputation in the community. A manager will lose trust in his employees if they are not able to tell the truth in the hard times.
The “Golden Rule” is a great rebuttal for this situation. If I made a mistake, of course I would want one of my friends to help me correct it, but in this case, helping your friend out does not solely hurt the company that you work for. Choosing to side with my friend can also potentially hurt my fellow employees in the long run as well as my reputation is the business world. If the company is not able to overcome the poor financial position this could put them in, people could lose their jobs. Also, if they found out that I was involved in the conspiracy, not only would I get fired, but I would also gain a bad reputation since the story would probably leak into the community.
I do believe that ethical values change over time, to an extent. In my personal experience, getting older and learning/experiencing new things is what has evolved my