Introduction
Pinto’s case is one of the cases that highlight on decision making within a company, or an organization. Organizations are usually faced with many instances and there is a need to balance the consumers’ desired products as well as providing the product that fits the users’ needs.
The case of pinto is one good example of how ethics of an organization can be compromised. To start with, the management does not follow the ethics that their work requires them to have. After carrying out the testing and confirming that there was a risk and not doing anything about it is an indication of such.
As professionals, managers owe it to the organization as well as the society to produce products that are of good quality and safe to use. The dilemma that hit the management because Pinto’s space was being reduced in case the oil tank was to be shifted to different area of the vehicle led to the decision being arrived at, though the decision was against the law of the land.
The reason Ford decided to continue manufacturing the product in question, though the testing was not on favor of putting the oil tank in the particular position that would lead to a risk of bursting in collision was entirely due to fear of how the sales were to be affected by such a move. In this case, the manager’s decision was entirely considering the market and the profits the company was to get for maintaining the oil tank in that particular position (Trevino & Nelson, 2007).
The decision entirely ignored the fact that the consumers were to be affected by the decision of not making the changes necessary to make the product safe. Such a move is unethical as it compromises the market in the long run. It took a few accidents for the decision to affect the profits the company was planning to get, and the company had to incur cost of recalling back the vehicles they had produced as they were deemed risky to the customers.
The quality of a product makes it have an edge in the market. In the case of Pinto, the size of the product is one of the things that made them have control of the market for small cars. The fear of the unknown, in this case the changes on the space, led them to make a decision that was to haunt them in future (DeGeorge, 2010).
Having a Pinto car with a small size to them was not a risk they were willing to take. In turn, this made them act in unethical manner where they compromised the safety of the consumers, for the risk of losing market on the product.
The profit to be realized also affected the decision to be arrived at on the case. It is usually the desire of each and every organization to realize the highest possible profits from the sale of their goods. The same case applied for the Ford Company.
The fact they are out to make profit led them decide to have a car that was not safe in a case of collision, which would still maintain the profit level they were experiencing. Though this was not in observance of the ethics of the profession, they were more concerned on how much profit they would have lost, in case they did observe the safety issue that was arising.
Among the various reasons why there are scandals in numerous organizations is the lack of ethics between people in an organization (Drozdenko and Jin, 2010). Organizational ethics is a scenario where the employees, regardless of the position they hold are continually following the professional ethics abiding to them.
The Pinto case is one of the cases that reflect the issues of ethics in the organization. The decision by the management on the production is a show of how at times, management may make unethical decision due to the pressure to maintain their market and get profits.
References
DeGeorge, R. T. (2010). Business ethics (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Drozdenko, R. G., & Jin K. G. (2010). Relationships among Perceived Organizational Core Values, Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethics, and Organizational Performance Outcomes:An Empirical Study of InformationTechnology Professionals , 342.
Trevino, L. K., & Nelson, K. A. (2007). Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right (4th ed).Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.