Week 5 Overview — Implementing an Ethics Program

Week 5 turns from the theory of business ethics toward the mechanics of running an ethics program inside a real organization. Chapter 9 answers a practical question: once a company decides it wants to behave ethically, what actually has to exist to make that happen? The chapter walks through five sequential steps — building a program structure with an accountable ethics officer, writing a code of conduct, training the workforce, handling reports of misconduct, and monitoring whether any of it is working. The Canvas Overview page frames the week through a narrower lens: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as one of the substantive areas an ethics program has to address, alongside the harder mechanical question of how an organization examines its own DEI statements and turns them into policy.

This is a lighter week by design. There is exactly one graded deliverable — the Code of Conduct in Medical Tourism discussion forum — worth 6% of the course grade, due as a first post on Day 3. There is no written assignment. The module also lists an End of Course Survey, which is ungraded and exists purely to collect course feedback; it carries no points and does not require the depth of preparation the discussion does.

The Introduction on the Canvas Overview page opens with a scenario: an organization with an inclusive culture, 72% workforce coverage in its regional diversity data, and a high inclusion index — a composite measure built from employees' sense of belonging, psychological safety, perceived fairness, and trust, gathered through an annual all-employee engagement survey. The scenario exists to make two questions concrete before you read further: how do you examine an organization's diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, and how do organizations actually implement DEI policies once they have written them? Chapter 9's five-step framework for implementing any ethics program — not DEI policy specifically — is the analytical tool the week hands you to answer both questions.

The Canvas Overview page lists three Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs) for Week 5. They are reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Notice that WLO 1 is squarely a Chapter 9 skill applied directly in the discussion forum, while WLOs 2 and 3 draw almost entirely on the week's DEI articles. The discussion prompt itself does not ask you to write a DEI statement — it asks for a code of conduct for a medical tourism practice. The DEI learning outcomes exist because Chapter 9 treats DEI as one of the substantive risk areas a modern code of conduct increasingly has to address, and because the required articles all orbit the same real-world tension: organizations are examining, defending, and sometimes retreating from their DEI commitments under legal and political pressure. Read the code-of-conduct task and the DEI readings as two halves of one question — what should a code cover, and why has one of the areas it increasingly covers, DEI, become contested.

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 5 assigns a single chapter.

Chapter 9 opens with Gunvor Group, a global energy trader that paid bribery penalties twice in under a decade — first in 2019 for bribing officials in the Republic of Congo and Ivory Coast, then in 2023-2024 for a $661 million penalty tied to bribing Ecuadorian officials through shell companies. The case is used to make a blunt point: creating an ethics program on paper is not the same as implementing one that actually prevents misconduct. Chapter 9 exists to close that gap. For the full chapter walk-through — every named framework, the ethics officer's responsibilities, the eight recommended sections of a code of conduct, training delivery methods, the four-step investigation process, and the chapter's own closing discussion questions — see the Chapter 9 deep-dive study guide on this site. This overview does not repeat that material; it only orients you to where the chapter lands in this week's work.

Beyond Chapter 9, the Resources page assigns five articles and webpages, all oriented around diversity, equity, and inclusion policy and its current legal and organizational pressures. Each is summarized below.

4.1 America's bosses grapple with threats to diversity policies (2023)

This unsigned piece from The Economist (2023, October 2) examines how the threat of lawsuits is pushing companies to adapt or scale back their DEI policies. It documents a shift in the legal and political environment following affirmative-action rulings and litigation targeting corporate diversity programs, and describes how legal risk — not just internal culture change — is now a primary force shaping what companies say and do about DEI. It is useful background for understanding why a code of conduct's DEI language increasingly has to be drafted with litigation exposure in mind, not only stakeholder values.

4.2 How to avoid the unexpected consequences of your DEI policy (Conzon, 2023)

Conzon, V. M. (2023, October 6), writing in Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, describes how employers can avoid negative side effects of DEI policies that were well-intentioned but poorly designed — for example, initiatives that inadvertently create new forms of resentment, tokenism, or legal exposure. The article's core argument is that DEI policy design matters as much as DEI policy intent: a program built without care for unintended consequences can undercut the very goals it was meant to serve.

4.3 The case for an inclusive workplace: Beyond rhetoric and rote policy (Gilbert & Hood, 2020)

Gilbert, J. A., & Hood, J. N. (2020), in SAM Advanced Management Journal, draw a sharp distinction between surface-level diversity — visible attributes like gender, race, and color — and genuine inclusion, which the authors define as a workplace community where employees are encouraged to speak, dress, and behave as they normally would. The article's argument is that many organizations stop at counting diverse hires (diversity) without building the culture that lets those employees actually belong and contribute fully (inclusion), and that real inclusion requires moving past rhetoric and rote policy into practiced behavior.

4.4 What does your company really stand for? (Ingram & Choi, 2022)

Ingram, P., & Choi, Y. (2022), in Harvard Business Review, argue that organizations gain measurable benefits — in recruiting, retention, and reputation — when they align their stated strategy with the values employees actually hold and act on. Misalignment between what a company says it stands for and what it does in practice is treated as a governance and credibility risk, directly relevant to why a code of conduct's stated values need to be backed by consistent implementation rather than aspirational language alone.

4.5 Diversity and inclusion efforts that really work (Pedulla, 2020)

Pedulla, D. (2020, May 12), writing in Harvard Business Review, reviews what the research evidence actually shows about which DEI interventions change outcomes and which are mostly symbolic. The article pushes back against common but weakly supported practices (such as one-off unconscious-bias training with no structural follow-through) and highlights interventions with stronger evidence behind them, such as structured hiring processes and accountability mechanisms tied to concrete goals.

4.6 Two additional webpages

Colvin, C. (2022, June 14), "Why and how to move past the DEI 'business case'" (HR Dive), argues for grounding DEI policy in ethical reasoning rather than solely a business-case justification — the idea that DEI is worth doing because it improves the bottom line. Dixon-Fyle, S., Dolan, K., Hunt, V., & Prince, S. (2020, May 19), "Diversity wins: How inclusion matters" (McKinsey & Company), is the well-known McKinsey report correlating diversity in leadership with financial outperformance, and is the article most likely to be cited if your discussion post leans on a business-case argument. Read both, since a strong post may need to engage the tension between the ethical case and the business case for DEI, not simply assert one.

The discussion forum, Code of Conduct in Medical Tourism, does not ask you to summarize DEI policy — it asks you to write a code of conduct for a medical tourism practice located outside the United States, with four required elements: organizational values, guidelines for acceptable behavior, compliance with legislation, and examples of prohibited acts. Chapter 9 supplies the direct structural template for that task. The DEI articles supply something different: a live, contested example of how one substantive risk area (DEI) gets written into, or fought over within, an organization's ethical commitments — useful context for the "organizational values" and "compliance with legislation" elements of your code, especially if your medical tourism practice serves a diverse international clientele or workforce.

Medical tourism is also its own topic worth researching independently before you draft. The discussion prompt explicitly instructs you to research medical tourism before working on the assignment — it is a growing industry, especially in developing countries, where patients travel abroad because treatment is cheaper or unavailable at home. A strong code of conduct will reflect real features of that industry: cross-border patient safety and informed consent, varying local medical licensing and legal standards, patient data privacy across jurisdictions, and the ethical questions raised by patients traveling specifically to access care that may be restricted, unavailable, or differently regulated in their home country.

Week 5's calendar is simple by this course's standards: one graded discussion forum, with an initial post due Day 3 and peer replies due Day 7, plus an ungraded survey with no fixed deadline pressure.

1. Read Chapter 9 in full, focusing on Section 9.2 (Developing a Code of Conduct) and its eight recommended sections, since these map almost one-to-one onto the discussion prompt's four required elements.
2. Read the five required DEI articles and two webpages, tracking which take the ethical-case position and which take the business-case position on DEI — you will likely want to cite at least one alongside your three additional scholarly sources.
3. Spend 20-30 minutes researching medical tourism as an industry, since the discussion prompt requires this before you draft — cross-border care, cost differentials, and regulatory variation are the load-bearing facts your code of conduct needs to reflect realistically.
4. Draft the code of conduct itself using Chapter 9's structure as a checklist: organizational values, behavioral guidelines, legislative compliance, and prohibited acts, written as if it were an actual internal document, not a description of one.
5. Locate and cite three scholarly resources beyond the course text and your selected DEI article, in APA Style, and post by Day 3.
6. Use the days between Day 3 and Day 7 to read classmates' codes of conduct and post three substantive peer replies of 150+ words each.
7. With whatever time this lighter week frees up, begin reading ahead for Week 6's final paper — review its prompt and rubric now rather than waiting for Week 6 to open, since a final paper benefits more than any other deliverable from an early start.

OMM 640 builds from the conceptual foundations of business ethics and social responsibility in the early weeks toward organizational application in the back half of the course. Week 5 is the clearest application week yet: Chapter 9 is entirely about how an ethics commitment gets translated into a working program, and the discussion forum asks you to produce a real artifact — a code of conduct — rather than analyze someone else's. The DEI thread running through the required readings previews a recurring theme in contemporary business ethics: stated organizational values are only as credible as the implementation and legal grounding behind them, a lesson Chapter 9's five-step framework (structure, standards, training, reporting, monitoring) generalizes to any ethical commitment, not DEI alone.

The lighter workload this week is deliberate positioning ahead of Week 6, which closes the course with a final paper. Treat Week 5 as a pivot point: finish the discussion forum efficiently, and use the freed time to get a head start on the reading and outlining Week 6 will demand.