Complying with the basic ethical principles and at the same time succeeding at an increasing pace in the global economy is a rather challenging task; with every new opportunity for improving the living standards of the company members emerging, the necessity to address the needs of every single stakeholder becomes more and more tedious. As the case of PharmaCARE shows, adherence to ethical postulates may easily be disregarded by the members of an organization once their priorities shift to financial gain and materialism. Although the case of PharmaCARE seems hopeless, the issue can still be resolved with the help of a major change in the organization’s ethical debilitation through the introduction of a different leadership approach and a set of strong values for the staff to comply with.
The patients of the PharmaCARE Company are obviously the key stakeholders in the specified scenario, seeing that they were the ones, whose rights were infringed by the company’s despicable actions. However, apart from the customers and the target audience, the scenario in question also incorporates the organization and the local authorities as to the obvious stakeholders, as the former was the instigator of the ethical issue in question, and the latter was supposed to investigate the case based on the existing regulations.
When viewed from the basic tenets of the human rights theory, the fault of the PharmaCARE Company becomes obvious. Justifying their actions by their corporate ethics that was flawed to the core, they infringed the key human rights of the local residents, specifically the right to live (Ionesco, 2012). On the one hand, the company did not deprive the local residents of their resources personally; on the one hand, the organization members created the premises for the local frauds to deceive their neighbors and deprive them of good food and proper living conditions. The organization, in its turn, enjoys the benefits that have been taken from the local people in a dishonest way, which is an obvious infringement of basic human rights, specifically, the right to live a decent life (Kangaslahti, 2013).
There is no need to stress the fact that the ethical values of PharmaCARE leave much to be desired. More to the point, the organization needs urgent changes, without which it will not last long in the global economy. First and most important, it is essential that the PharmaCARE Company should get its priorities straight; to be more exact, the organization will need to reevaluate the significance of its key stakeholders. Consequently, the strategies for keeping the stakeholders in question devoted to the organization will need to be designed.
As far as the loyalty of the target customers and the lenience of the media are concerned, the organization may upgrade its reputation towards a more socially acceptable one by improving its current set of ethical principles and putting the well-being of the stakeholders in general and the local residents in particular. The introduction of a more appropriate set of ethical guidelines is, therefore, the second change that PharmaCARE needs to suffer so that it could regain its positive reputation. Upholding to a set of more rigid standards is most likely to be quite complicated for the organization, yet the results will help address the current situation when the company’s efforts have been discredited by the outcomes of its unethical choices.
Finally, the third change that PharmaCARE will have to make concerns its leadership structure and approach. At present, the company’s standpoint on a range of essential issues, including ethical ones, seems rather inconsistent, which is graphic evidence of a poor leadership approach adopted by the head of PramaCARE. Incorporation of a transformative leadership approach will help enhance the motivation of the staff, at the same time instilling new and more adequate ethical principles in the company (Eghdarny, 2013).
Though PharmaCARE’s case seems quite transparent at present and its fault is practically proven, the analysis of the organization’s responsibilities will be incomplete without mentioning its recent environmental advances. Indeed, the organization, whose activity has been marked as deleterious, appears to have a rather positive record in terms of its environmental policy and activities.
Encouraging recycling and the related initiatives, however, pale before the fact that PharmaCARE’s activities have led to the victory over environmental laws and regulations. The fact that the Superfund tax was subverted by the organization displays the company’s actual intentions in a very graphic manner – it seems that the specified environmental activities serve as a foil for the organization to grow strong in the global economy and do not have any redeemable value on their own, only serving to make the company look good.
Analyzed from the Utilitarian perspective, the ethical issue that the PharmaCARE Company ended up entangled in is also quite simple. Seeing that the outcomes of the actions undertaken by the organization harmed the people living in the vicinity, the key foundation of the Utilitarian theory of happiness and harmony to be the outcome of any action was clearly disregarded (Lowry & Peterson, 2012).
Likewise, the main postulates of Deontology demonstrate the problems of the solution made by PharmaCARE. As Deontology dictates, one must act from their duty (Dina, 2013), which in PharmaCARE’s case meant acting on behalf of its patients and making sure that the actions taken do not harm anyone in any possible manner. The effects of PharmaCARE’s actions, however, display that the organization had no regard for the wellbeing of anyone outside of its staff.
The same can be said about Virtue Ethics as a foundation for evaluating the PharmaCARE case. While, as a healthcare company, the organization was supposed to display the unwillingness to cause harm to any single person according to Virtue Ethics (McPherson, 2013), PharmaCARE consciously and willingly neglected the fact that the local population was suffering because of its selfish actions and allowed its staff to indulge in luxurious existence. Consequently, the company members promoted the vice of egotism where it was supposed to follow the virtue of caring, altruism and compassion.
The Ethics of Care also disapproves of PharmaCARE’s course of action. There is very little of actual understanding of the significance of mutual care and understanding in the decisions taken by the PharmaCARE Company leader. Quite on the contrary, the choices made by the organization do not presuppose any emotional connection with the local residents, which means that the Ethics of Care tenets have also been violated by the organization to a great degree (Paulsen, 2011).
The alterations suggested for the company to undergo may also seem dubious from the perspective of certain ethical theories. The Ethics of Care perspective, for instance, will require that the values of the organization should be aimed at promoting safety of the staff, the customers and the people living in the vicinity at the same time; therefore, a multi-objective approach will have to be adopted to meet the demands of the Ethics of Care approach (Paulsen, 2011).
The Utilitarianism ethics, however, praises the positive intention, which means that the very idea of changing towards a more ethically appropriate model of operation within the global economy is already a decent start (Lowry & Peterson, 2012). In terms of the Deontology postulates, however, the specified suggestions may seem somewhat non-specific, as the current priority of the organization is to eliminate the deplorable consequences of its previous actions (Dina, 2013).
The Virtue obviously approves of the alterations, which the PharmaCARE Company is going to suffer in the course of its rejuvenation. Seeing that the company aims at satisfying the key stakeholders with its innovative approach, the changes are fully justified from the perspective of the Virtue Ethics (McPherson, 2013). Eventually, from my own ethical perspective, the specified changes can be interpreted as quite appropriate. Despite being long-term and addressing the specified conflict between the organization and the local dwellers only in a general manner, it allows for designing the premises for a further major change in not only the company’s operations, but also the motivation of the employees. In other words, the ethical rules are going to be followed not because the staff will be afraid of the ensuing punishment, but because acting differently will not conform to their own convictions and ethical principles.
One must admit, though, that PharmaCARE is not the only company that has been facing major ethical issues and choosing an advertently wrong solution to address them. A recent audit conducted by OSHA has led to the discovery of workplace safety negligence in the Schaumburg Company. According to the report, the company deliberately violated the key safety principles 25 times, therefore putting the lives of its staff and clients in serious peril (OSHA fines Schaumburg company $86K for workplace safety issues, 2015, 12 February, para. 2). By providing the temporary workers with less safety than the permanent employees, the organization violated the rights of the former severely. Much like the PharmaCARE case, the specified issue manifests the unwillingness of organizations to comply with the state regulations. However, unlike PharmaCARE, Schaumburg does not affect the customers directly, only creating the premises for workplace issues and the drop in production quality.
Reconsidering organizational values in general and ethical principles in particular is a challenging task, and the PharmaCARE will only survive the reorganization of its priorities once a strong leadership strategy enhancing the motivation of the staff is incorporated into its framework. Although the situation might seem desperate at present, PharmaCARE’s reputation can still be helped, once the company eliminates every trace of egotistic intentions in its vision and mission statement. An overview of similar ethical issues in another company has shown that the consequences of dismissing ethical implications of a thoughtless pursuit of financial gain leads to rather deplorable results; therefore, or the sake of keeping the company’s integrity and at the same time gear it towards a more successful performance. Therefore, as long as the PharmaCARE organization adopts different vision and mission, which will allow it for meeting the requirements of every stakeholder, it will be capable of becoming successful in the global environment.
Reference List
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Eghdarny, I. (2013). Transformative leadership. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, 4(9), 93–98.
Ionesco, E. (2012). The inalienable right to live. The Human Life Review, 38(2), 77–80.
Kangaslahti, M. (2013). Human rights, human responsibilities and education: prerequisites to happy life. Cogito, 5(1), 7–10.
Lowry, R. & Peterson, M. (2012). Cost-benefit analysis and non-utilitarian ethics. Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 11(3), 258–279.
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OSHA fines Schaumburg company $86K for workplace safety issues. (2015, 12 February). Chicago SunTimes. Web.
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