Developing an Ethical Culture

Developing an Ethical Culture is Week 4's assignment, tied to Weekly Learning Outcomes 2, 4, and 5, Course Learning Outcomes 3, 4, and 5, and NACE competencies 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8. It asks you to step outside the role of student and into the role of a midlevel organizational manager who has noticed that the organizational culture around them is contributing to unethical decision-making by subordinates and peers. Your job in the paper is to research that problem and hand leadership something useful: a diagnosis and a set of solutions.

The Prompt, Restated

Before drafting, Canvas directs you to review Chapters 7 and 8 of the textbook, three external articles — A New Model for Ethical Leadership, Building an Ethical Company, and 5 Research-Backed Strategies for Building an Ethical Culture at Work — and the webpage Building an Ethical Workplace. These sources exist to ground your paper in real frameworks rather than generic opinion about workplace ethics.

In the paper, you must accomplish three things, each phrased with a specific verb.

• Directive 1 — List some ethical concerns you have noticed in organizations you have worked in or observed.
• Directive 2 — Identify some opportunities for leadership to provide solutions.
• Directive 3 — Propose some consulting advice for the leaders.

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.

Directive 1 asks you to list ethical concerns you have noticed in organizations you have worked in or observed. This is not an invitation to invent a hypothetical scandal — it asks for grounded, specific observations, whether drawn from your own work history or from documented cases discussed in the course. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 give you the vocabulary to name what you are seeing precisely rather than vaguely.

Naming Concerns With the Chapter's Own Language

Chapter 7 distinguishes a moral manager (one who sets standards, holds others accountable, and models ethical conduct) from a hypocritical manager (one who talks about ethics without acting on it) and an amoral or ethically neutral leader (one who simply does not make ethics a priority). It also names moral reproach — when employees sense their leader judges their values as morally unequal — as a specific driver of the deviant behavior that follows. Chapter 8 supplies organizational-level concepts: a mismatch between espoused values (what the company says) and values taken for granted (what actually happens), weak alignment between formal policies and the informal culture, or a company that has standards and procedures on paper but no functioning training, reporting, or disciplinary follow-through behind them.

A strong Directive 1 section names two or three concrete concerns — for example, a manager who talks about integrity but never disciplines high performers for cutting corners (hypocritical leadership), or a reporting hotline that exists on paper but that employees do not trust because no one has ever seen a report acted on (a Pillar Three or Pillar Four failure in Ethisphere's eight-pillar framework from Chapter 8). Naming the specific mechanism, not just the symptom, is what separates analysis from complaint.

Directive 2 asks you to identify opportunities for leadership to provide solutions. Having named the concerns in Directive 1, this section asks where in the organization's structure leadership could realistically intervene. Chapter 7's characteristics of ethical leaders — personifying organizational values, creating mechanisms of dissent, framing actions in ethical terms, and holding people accountable through compensation and promotion decisions — each point to a specific lever leadership can pull.

Matching the Opportunity to the Concern

If the concern you raised in Directive 1 was a hypocritical manager, the opportunity for leadership is accountability: tying integrity explicitly to compensation, promotion, and performance-review criteria, the way Chapter 7 describes Prudential Financial doing through its Business Ethics Officer structure. If the concern was a reporting mechanism nobody trusts, the opportunity is building genuine psychological safety — the shared belief, described in Chapter 7 through the U.S. Bank example, that speaking up will not be punished. If the concern was a values-versus-practice mismatch, the opportunity is Chapter 8's alignment argument: bringing the vision, mission, and standards of behavior into agreement so the formal culture and the informal culture stop pulling in different directions.

This section is also the place to draw on the three assigned articles. A New Model for Ethical Leadership and 5 Research-Backed Strategies for Building an Ethical Culture at Work are written specifically to supply intervention points — leadership behaviors, training approaches, or structural changes — that you can cite alongside the textbook to show the opportunity is grounded in more than one source.

Directive 3 asks you to propose consulting advice for the leaders. This is the section where the paper earns its "consulting" framing: rather than describing what leadership could do in the abstract, you recommend what they should do, in the voice of someone advising them directly. It is the most rubric-consequential of the three directives because it demonstrates synthesis rather than description.

Drawing the Advice From Chapter 8's Ethics Program Elements

Chapter 8 lays out the elements of an effective organizational ethics program: program oversight and management, vetting the delegation of substantial authority, standards and procedures, training and communication, checking and reporting, disciplinary procedures and incentives, response to critical issues, and periodic risk assessment. These elements function as a menu of consulting recommendations. If your Directive 1 concern was inconsistent discipline, recommend a specific fix drawn from the disciplinary-procedures element — for instance, applying the same consequences to high performers and low performers alike, since Chapter 7 notes that failing to do so is what erodes trust fastest. If the concern was a values-mission mismatch, recommend the kind of alignment work Gebler's three-elements model describes: auditing whether the standards of behavior actually reflect the stated mission, not just whether a mission statement exists.

Specificity is what makes this section read as consulting advice rather than a summary of the chapter. Naming a mechanism (a code of conduct revision, a Business Ethics Officer role, a revised bonus structure that penalizes integrity violations regardless of results) is stronger than recommending, generally, that leadership "build a stronger ethical culture."

The paper requires at least 3 scholarly sources in addition to the course text. The four assigned resources — A New Model for Ethical Leadership, Building an Ethical Company, 5 Research-Backed Strategies for Building an Ethical Culture at Work, and the Building an Ethical Workplace webpage — are efficient choices since Canvas has already vetted them as relevant, but they must still be evaluated against the Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources standard the assignment references. Not every assigned reading necessarily counts as a scholarly source; a general-audience webpage may support your argument but should not substitute for peer-reviewed or otherwise credible research where the assignment requires scholarly sourcing.

• The course text (Gonzalez-Padron, Chapters 7 and 8) is required and does not count toward the 3-source minimum.
• At least 3 scholarly sources beyond the text are required — the assigned articles are a reasonable starting point if they meet the scholarly/credible bar; supplement with additional research via the library if needed.
• Every source used must be cited in APA Style in-text and listed on a separate references page.
• If a source's credibility is unclear, contact the instructor before submission — the instructor has final say on source appropriateness.

A 4–5 page paper built around three directives, plus a required introduction and conclusion, needs a deliberate section plan. The outline below maps cleanly onto the directives and the required structure.

1. Title page (separate page — not counted in the 4–5 page body).
2. Introduction, ending in a clear thesis statement previewing your diagnosis of the organization's ethical culture and the direction of your recommendations.
3. Section 1 — Ethical concerns observed in the organization (Directive 1).
4. Section 2 — Opportunities for leadership to intervene (Directive 2).
5. Section 3 — Consulting advice for the leaders (Directive 3).
6. Conclusion, restating the thesis in light of the analysis and summarizing what the organization stands to gain from acting on the advice.
7. References page (separate page — not counted in the 4–5 page body).

The Canvas scrape for this assignment does not include the text of the grading rubric itself — Canvas directs students to "carefully review the grading rubric below" within the assignment page, but that rubric's specific point values and criteria were not captured in the source material used to build this guide. Rather than invent rubric language, the categories below are inferred directly from the assignment's own stated requirements and the three directives, which is the safest way to anticipate grading without fabricating specifics you cannot verify.

• Stopping at Directive 1. A paper that lists ethical concerns and never clearly identifies leadership opportunities or proposes consulting advice has completed one-third of the assignment.
• Vague opportunities and advice. "Leadership should communicate better" or "the company should be more ethical" restates the problem instead of naming a mechanism — tie every recommendation to a specific lever from Chapter 7 or Chapter 8.
• Disconnected sections. If the concerns, opportunities, and advice do not visibly build on one another, the paper reads as three separate lists rather than one argument.
• Fewer than three scholarly sources beyond the text. The assignment requires at least 3 — the four assigned readings are a strong starting point but should be checked against the scholarly/credible source standard.
• Skipping the thesis statement. Canvas names this as a specific checklist item — an introduction without an explicit thesis sentence will be marked down.
• Generic, hypothetical examples with no specificity. Concerns and advice grounded in a real or realistically detailed organizational situation read as stronger analysis than abstract, textbook-only restatement.
• 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.