Week 3 Overview — Ethical Decision Making and Ethical Traps

Week 3 moves the course from the foundational ethical theory of Weeks 1 and 2 into the applied, decision-oriented core of the class: how does a manager actually decide what to do when an ethical question comes up, and why do otherwise good people sometimes get it wrong anyway? Chapter 5 gives you the toolkit — the three ethical dimensions (action, agent, outcome), the individual and situational factors that shape a person's moral reasoning, and a full five-step ethical decision-making model you will use directly in the assignment. Chapter 6 supplies the warning label: even a manager who knows the theory and has a decision-making model in hand can be pulled off course by predictable psychological traps — obedience to authority, small incremental steps, conformity, groupthink, competition, time pressure, overconfidence, overoptimism, self-serving bias, sidestepping responsibility, and role morality.

The Week 3 Overview page frames the week's purpose directly: a manager who engages in real moral reasoning is more effective at encouraging ethical behavior in a workforce, and every organization needs a well-designed ethics and compliance program that balances rules and punishment with policies that build loyalty and protect the well-being of all stakeholders. The two graded deliverables this week put both chapters to direct use — the discussion forum asks you to diagnose a real ethical trap using Chapter 6's vocabulary, and the assignment asks you to build and apply an ethical decision-making model, specifically the PLUS model from Chapter 5, to a real organizational dilemma.

Overview Table of Deliverables

The table below reproduces the Week 3 Overview page's deliverable table exactly. Together the two deliverables carry 17% of the course grade, with the assignment the heavier of the two.

The Week 3 Overview page lists three Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs). They are reproduced below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Read the three outcomes as a single arc: WLO 1 teaches you to recognize when a decision process is failing, WLO 2 supplies the leadership vocabulary for why some people and organizations resist that failure better than others, and WLO 3 asks you to build the structured process that prevents the failure in the first place. The assignment is the outcome that pulls all three together, since a workable ethical decision-making model only has value if it is explicitly designed to catch the traps Chapter 6 describes.

The required text remains Gonzalez-Padron, T. (2025). Business Ethics and Social Responsibility for Managers (2nd ed.). The University of Arizona Global Campus, available through the Constellation website. Week 3 assigns two chapters.

For a full walk-through of each chapter's frameworks, key terms, and closing discussion questions, see the dedicated Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 deep-dive study guides on this site — this overview does not repeat that material, only where it lands in the week's work.

A Book Chapter and Three Articles

Beyond the two textbook chapters, the Resources page names a supplemental case-study book chapter, two required articles, one webpage, and an interactive multimedia piece that anchor the week's discussion and assignment work.

• Mitchell, P. A. (Ed.). (2019). Ethical Decision-Making: Cases in Organization and Leadership, Chapter 5 ("Corporate America"). Myers Education Press. Examines case studies of ethical decision-making by organizational leaders; available in full text through Ebook Central in the UAGC Library. Assists the Ethical Decision-Making Model assignment — see Section 7 of this guide for exactly how to use it, since its case text is not reproduced here.
• Schafer, J. (2011, April 16). The Ethical Trap. Psychology Today. Argues that ethical decision-making models, however elaborate, cannot fully capture the complexity of many ethical dilemmas — a required read that directly frames the discussion forum's definition of an ethical trap as distinct from an ordinary dilemma.
• Stearns, J., Fore, M., & Feltus, S. (2022, July). Ethics and Controls at Accountable Coffee Co. Strategic Finance, 104(1), 48–56. A case study of ethical decision-making at a fictionalized coffee company, available through the ProQuest database in the UAGC Library; assists the assignment with a worked example of decision-making controls in practice.
• Robinson, J. (2019, October 1). Why PLUS Decision Making Model Is Essential to Ethical Organizations. Flevyblog. Explains why organizations struggle to build simple guidelines that let employees at every level trust their decisions meet competing ethical standards, and frames the PLUS model as the answer; assists the assignment directly, since PLUS is the model the assignment requires you to apply.
• The University of Arizona Global Campus. (n.d.). Ethical Decision-Making [Interactive]. A brief interactive walkthrough of how organizations build an effective ethical decision-making model; useful orientation before drafting the assignment.

Chapter 5 organizes ethical theory around three complementary dimensions every business decision touches: actions (a deontological, rules-based focus on what is being done — company policy, law, codes of conduct), agents (a character-based focus on who is deciding — virtue ethics, ethics of care, the golden mean), and outcomes (a consequentialist focus on results — egoism, utilitarianism, distributive justice). The chapter then turns to the individual and situational factors that shape how a real person actually reasons through a dilemma: Kohlberg's stages of moral development, the social needs of achievement, affiliation, and power, cultural relativism and idealism, Jones's model of moral issue intensity, and organizational culture. It closes with the chapter's central practical tool: the PLUS ethical filter (Policies, Legal, Universal, Self) and a full five-step ethical decision-making model — identify the issue, identify the stakeholders, analyze alternatives, take action, and monitor outcome.

Chapter 6 asks why business ethics scandals so often involve people who genuinely believed themselves to be ethical — Toby Groves of Groves Funding Corporation, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, the tens of thousands of Wells Fargo employees who opened unauthorized accounts. The chapter's answer centers on bounded ethicality — an unconscious favoring of self-serving biases that keeps a person from even perceiving the ethical dimension of a decision — and the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to blame other people's bad choices on bad character while excusing our own bad choices as products of a difficult situation. It organizes the mechanisms that produce this blindness into primary traps (external pressures: obedience to authority, small incremental steps, conformity, groupthink, competition, time pressure), defensive traps (after-the-fact rationalizations), and personality traps (internal predispositions), then devotes a full section to cognitive fallacies — overconfidence, overoptimism, self-serving bias, sidestepping responsibility, and role morality.

Week 3 has two graded deliverables, each with a dedicated study guide that takes the prompt apart in full. The summaries below orient you and point you to the right companion document.

6.1 Discussion Forum — The Ethical Trap

Worth 6%, first post due Day 3. Before posting, review Chapters 5 and 6 and the Schafer (2011) article, The Ethical Trap. Your initial post discusses an ethical trap you are aware of or have researched in an organization, explains how the subject's actions allowed them to fall into that trap, and evaluates how the trap could have been avoided — carefully distinguishing an ethical trap (where the subject faces two ethical decisions) from an ordinary ethical dilemma. You must support your research with three scholarly resources beyond the Schafer article and the course text, cited and referenced in APA Style. The initial post runs 350 words minimum; peer replies of 150+ words to at least three classmates are due by Day 7. See the Week 3 Discussion 1 Study Guide.

6.2 Assignment — Ethical Decision-Making Model

Worth 11%, due Day 7. A 4–5 page APA paper in which you select a contemporary ethical dilemma at an organization you know or have researched, create a model for ethical decision-making based on that dilemma, evaluate all seven steps of the PLUS ethical decision-making model, analyze how you would apply each step to your chosen dilemma, and evaluate how the model could have mitigated the dilemma at your chosen organization. The paper also draws on Chapter 5 of Mitchell's Ethical Decision-Making: Cases in Organization and Leadership ("Corporate America") as required background reading. The paper requires at least 4 scholarly or credible sources beyond the course text. See the Week 3 Assignment Study Guide.

Chapter 5 of Mitchell's Ethical Decision-Making: Cases in Organization and Leadership, subtitled "Corporate America," is required reading for the assignment, and its full text lives in the Ebook Central database inside the UAGC Library — not in any file prepared for this study guide site. Do not treat that as an obstacle to skip; the assignment names it as required background for a reason: it is a worked case study of ethical decision-making by real organizational leaders, and it models the kind of concrete, organization-specific analysis the assignment's grading rubric rewards.

Before drafting the assignment, log into the UAGC Library, search Ebook Central for Mitchell's Ethical Decision-Making: Cases in Organization and Leadership, and read Chapter 5 in full. Take notes on how the case's leaders approached (or failed to approach) their dilemma using a structured process, since a paper that engages the book's actual case content, alongside your own chosen dilemma, demonstrates the research depth the assignment expects. See the Week 3 Assignment Study Guide for how to fold the Mitchell chapter into your paper's structure without inventing details this guide has not verified.

OMM 640 builds from foundational ethical theory (Weeks 1–2) toward applied managerial judgment. Week 3 marks that shift concretely: Chapter 5 hands you a structured process for making an ethical call, and Chapter 6 immediately complicates it by showing every way that process can be derailed by ordinary human psychology rather than bad character. This pairing is deliberate — a decision-making model taught without its failure modes would leave you overconfident in exactly the way Chapter 6 warns against.

The vocabulary introduced this week — the three ethical dimensions, the PLUS model, bounded ethicality, obedience to authority, groupthink, and the cognitive fallacies — recurs whenever later weeks turn to ethical leadership, compliance programs, and organizational culture, all of which assume you can already recognize both a sound decision process and the traps that threaten it. Treat the PLUS model and the five-step decision framework in particular as reference tools you will keep reaching for, not material to clear after this week's assignment.