Ethical Decision-Making Model

Ethical Decision-Making Model is Week 3's assignment, worth 11% of the course grade — nearly double the discussion forum — and it is anchored to Weekly Learning Outcomes 2 and 3 and Course Learning Outcomes 1, 3, and 4, with NACE competencies 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8. Before beginning, Canvas requires you to review Chapters 5 and 6 of the textbook, Chapter 5 of Mitchell's Ethical Decision-Making: Cases in Organization and Leadership, the Stearns, Fore, and Feltus (2022) article on Accountable Coffee Co., and the Robinson (2019) webpage on the PLUS model. This guide restates the deliverable specification, walks the assignment's four required directives against the PLUS model's seven steps, gives you a source-by-source research plan, an outline you can follow directly, a rubric map, and closes with pitfalls and a Quick Reference table.

The Prompt, Restated

The assignment asks you to select a contemporary ethical dilemma at an organization you are familiar with or find through research, and then, in your paper, accomplish four things.

• Directive 1 — Create a model for ethical decision-making based on your selected ethical dilemma.
• Directive 2 — Evaluate all seven steps of the PLUS ethical decision-making model.
• Directive 3 — Analyze how you can apply each step to your chosen dilemma.
• Directive 4 — Evaluate how the model could have mitigated the ethical dilemma at your chosen organization.

Canvas lists the formatting requirements as a checklist. Meeting every item is a floor for a passing grade, independent of the quality of the analysis.

The assignment asks you to select a contemporary ethical dilemma at an organization you are familiar with or find through research. Unlike the discussion forum, this assignment wants a dilemma, not a trap — a genuine values conflict among stakeholders that a decision-making model can be applied to, rather than a case study in the psychological mechanics of moral failure. A useful dilemma for this paper has real competing stakeholder interests, is recent or ongoing ("contemporary"), and has enough public or personal detail available that you can meaningfully work through all seven PLUS steps against it.

Strong dilemma categories include: a data-privacy or AI-use decision at a technology company, a product-safety or recall decision, a workforce decision with an ethical dimension (layoffs, outsourcing, automation displacing workers), a supply-chain or labor-conditions issue, or an environmental or sustainability trade-off. The Stearns, Fore, and Feltus (2022) Accountable Coffee Co. case and Mitchell's Corporate America case studies (Section 7 below) are useful models for the kind of organizational specificity the assignment rewards, even if you ultimately choose a different, independently researched dilemma.

The name "PLUS" itself names only four filter questions — Policies, Legal, Universal, Self — drawn from Chapter 5's ethical filter (Ethics & Compliance Initiative, 2022) and explained further by Robinson (2019). The assignment's requirement to evaluate "all seven steps," however, points to the fuller five-step ethical decision-making process Chapter 5 builds out, with the PLUS filter embedded as the analytical lens applied at each stage. Read together, the seven steps this assignment expects you to evaluate are best organized as the chapter's five-step process, with the PLUS filter's four letters folded into Steps 1 and 3 where the textbook itself applies them. The table below gives you a defensible seven-step structure.

Directive 1 asks you to create a model — meaning you should present the seven-step structure as your own organized framework, in your own words and organization, with a clear explanation of why each step matters, rather than simply reproducing a textbook list. Directive 3 then asks you to analyze how each step applies specifically to your chosen dilemma. Every step needs a dilemma-specific sentence or two, not a restatement of the step's general definition.

For example, a weak Step 2 application says only "there are many stakeholders in this situation." A strong Step 2 application names the specific stakeholder groups for your dilemma (e.g., "warehouse employees facing displacement, the company's shareholders, the surrounding community dependent on the facility's tax base, and customers relying on continued service") and states what each group specifically values and wants, following the model of Chapter 5's Table 5.5 stakeholder analysis.

The Stearns, Fore, and Feltus (2022) Accountable Coffee Co. case study is useful here as a model of how a real organization builds specific controls and decision points into its ethics program — reference it to show how a company can operationalize a step like "analyze alternatives" or "monitor outcome" in practice, then apply that same level of operational specificity to your own chosen organization.

Directive 4 is the assignment's analytical payoff: having built and applied the seven-step model, you must evaluate how using it — as opposed to whatever decision process the organization actually used or failed to use — could have mitigated the dilemma. This is where Chapter 6's ethical traps become directly relevant, even though the assignment's required reading list for this directive centers on Chapter 5's model. The strongest papers name a specific trap from Chapter 6 (time pressure, groupthink, obedience to authority, overconfidence, small steps) that likely contributed to the dilemma in the first place, and then explain precisely which PLUS step, applied at which moment, would have interrupted that trap.

For example: if your dilemma involved a rushed decision under a deadline, argue that Step 1 (Identify the Issue) forces a pause to distinguish known facts from assumptions — precisely the kind of deliberate slowing-down that Chapter 6 identifies as the antidote to the time-pressure trap. If your dilemma involved a board or leadership team that failed to question a charismatic leader's claims, argue that Step 2's stakeholder analysis, done rigorously, would have surfaced dissenting stakeholder perspectives that the group's informal consensus (groupthink) had suppressed.

Canvas requires you to review Chapter 5 ("Corporate America") of Mitchell, P. A. (Ed.). (2019). Ethical Decision-Making: Cases in Organization and Leadership. Myers Education Press, before beginning this assignment. That chapter's full text is not included in the materials available for this study guide site — it lives in the Ebook Central database inside the UAGC Library. This guide will not invent details about that chapter's case content, since doing so risks misrepresenting the source you are required to actually read.

What can be said with confidence, based on the book's title and the assignment's own framing: Mitchell's collection presents case studies of ethical decision-making by leaders in organizations, and the "Corporate America" chapter specifically examines cases set in U.S. corporate contexts. The assignment lists this chapter as required background — not as a source you are required to cite, though citing it thoughtfully, if it strengthens your paper, is reasonable and would count toward your required scholarly/credible sources.

A 4–5 page paper with four directives, an introduction, and a conclusion needs a deliberate section plan. The outline below maps cleanly onto the directives and the required introduction/conclusion structure.

1. Title page (separate page — not counted in the 4–5 page body).
2. Introduction, ending in a clear thesis statement previewing your argument about how the PLUS-based decision-making model applies to, and could have mitigated, your chosen dilemma.
3. Section 1 — Introduce the contemporary ethical dilemma and the organization (brief; establish the facts your model will analyze).
4. Section 2 — Create and evaluate the seven-step PLUS-based decision-making model (Directives 1–2).
5. Section 3 — Apply each of the seven steps specifically to your chosen dilemma, using a stakeholder table and/or alternatives table (Directive 3).
6. Section 4 — Evaluate how the model could have mitigated the dilemma, naming the specific ethical trap(s) from Chapter 6 it would have interrupted (Directive 4).
7. Conclusion, restating the thesis in light of the analysis and closing on what the organization — or organizations facing similar dilemmas — should do differently going forward.
8. References page (separate page — not counted in the 4–5 page body).

Map your paper's sections to the assignment's four directives explicitly, since a rubric-aligned paper reads as a series of demonstrated skills rather than a general essay.

Before submitting, review the Ethical Decision-Making Model grading rubric under the Settings icon in Canvas and confirm each directive is visibly, separately addressed — not folded together so that a grader has to hunt for where Directive 4 is actually answered.

• Choosing a dilemma too thin to sustain seven distinct step-by-step applications, resulting in repetitive or generic content across steps.
• Treating Directive 1 as license to invent an unrelated model. The assignment's later directives require you to evaluate and apply the PLUS model specifically — build your model around it.
• Listing the seven steps without dilemma-specific analysis. Directive 3 asks you to apply each step, not merely define it a second time.
• Skipping Directive 4 or reducing it to a single restated sentence. This is the assignment's analytical payoff and likely carries real rubric weight — give it a full section with a specific, named trap and mechanism.
• Inventing details about the Mitchell case book. If you reference it, cite only what you have actually read in Ebook Central — do not guess at or fabricate case content.
• Fewer than four scholarly or credible sources beyond the course text. Stearns, Fore, and Feltus (2022) and Robinson (2019) are efficient, already-assigned choices; a source from Mitchell's book (if actually read) can count as a third or fourth.
• Skipping the thesis statement. Canvas names this as a specific checklist item — an introduction without an explicit thesis sentence will be marked down.
• Formatting slips. Missing the title-page spacing rule, wrong page count (body must be 4–5 pages, excluding title and references), or an incomplete references page are easy, avoidable point losses.