1. To help understand an organizational culture, think about some organization to which you belong. Does your company or school or fraternity/sorority have its own culture? How would you describe it? How does it infl uence
individual decision making and action? Would you be a different person had you attended a different school or joined a different fraternity or sorority? How would you go about changing your organization’s culture?
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2. Consider how you evaluate whether a fi rm is “one of the good guys” or not. What are some of the factors that you use to make this determination? Do you actually know the facts behind each of those elements, or has your judgment been shaped by the fi rm’s reputation? Identify one fi rm that you believe to be decent or ethical and make a note of the bases for that conclusion. Next identify a second fi rm that you do not believe to be ethical or with questionable values and write down the bases for that conclusion. Now, using the Internet and other relevant sources, explore the fi rms’
cultures and decisions, checking the results of your research against your original impressions of the fi rms. Try to evaluate the cultures and decisions of each fi rm as if you had no idea whether they were ethical. Were you accurate in your impressions or do they need to be modifi ed slightly?
3. Changing a corporate culture is very diffi cult. Imagine that you are asked by your chief executive to help move your fi rm toward the use of a triple bottomline accounting model in which environmental and social factors are given equal weight to fi nancial indicators. Assume that this would represent a major transformation of the fi rm. How would you begin to set the stage for this transition? What reasons would you use to support the change? How would you change attitudes and values?
4. Now that you have an understanding of corporate culture and the variables that impact it, how would you characterize an ethically effective culture, the one that would effectively lead to a profi table and valuable long-term sustainability for the fi rm?
5. One element that surely impacts a fi rm’s culture is its employee population. While a corporate culture can shape an employee’s attitudes and habits, this will be more easily done if people with those attitudes and habits already developed are hired in the fi rst place. How would you develop a recruitment-and-selection process that would most successfully allow you to hire the best workers for your particular culture? How would you, and should you, get rid of employees who do not share the corporate culture?
6. What are some of the greatest benefice ts and deleterious costs of compliance based cultures?
7. You are aware of inappropriate behavior and violations of your fi rm’s code
of conduct throughout your operation. In an effort to support a collegial and positive atmosphere, however, you do not encourage co-workers to report on their peers. Unfortunately, you believe that you must make a shift in that area and need to institute a mandatory reporting structure. How would you design the structure and how would you implement the new program in such a way that the collegiality that exists is not destroyed?
8. Put yourself in the position of someone who is establishing an organization from the ground up. What type of leader would you want to be? How would you create that image or perception? Do you create a mission statement for the fi rm, a code of conduct? What process would you use to do so? Would you create an ethics and/or compliance program and how would you then integrate the mission statement and program throughout your organization?
What do you anticipate might be your successes and challenges?
