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Xmgt/216 Ethical Dilemma

In: Business and Management

Submitted By missy1
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The ethical dilemma that I faced happened around ten years ago when I was the manager of a sporting goods store the summer of my first year of college at the university of Toledo. I got the job because of being an athlete my entire life and I love being around sports so for a summertime job I figured being football player for Toledo it would be beneficial for the store and myself to be a part of the team and also to help increase profit and sales because of my athletic background.
Well after about a month of working there I had become pretty good friends with many of the employees that also worked there with me. We all bonded pretty quickly because of athletics being our common bond. At play it again sports people traded in there used sports equipment for newer stuff they would get either consignment, trade, or cash all based on condition and also based on market value of the products being traded.
After a couple months I started to notice golf products and summer sports products missing granted as an employee we were allowed to sign out any used golf item to take out and try and the goal of that was to be able to give customers imput on how the club or clubs felt played and worked on the course. But as an employee you were only allowed to take out clubs for no more then 72 hrs because of potential profit loss/customer loss as well.
A couple of the employees were putting more money into other items people were trading and basically in a way stealing another product because it was hard to detect. Also some of them were signing out clubs and keeping them and in the computer changing it to look like we never carried it or that it never came in to the store by changing numbers around and deleting it from the system and to cover it up they would again put the money that was in the club or clubs into other items that came in to offset it so the owner wouldn’t catch it.
The dilemma was facing was that it was one of my close friends who was doing it because we went golfing together one of the days after work and I had noticed he had some of the clubs we had in the store but there were no tags on them. That’s when I went into the computer and discovered that knowing the club was in our store and hadn’t sold it didn’t even exist in our system anymore.
After about another week I confronted my friend slash employee and asked him if he knew anything about missing clubs and of course he denied it. I gave him one more opportunity to tell me the truth and I explained that friendship aside both of our jobs are on the line at this point because if the owner catches on and confronts him he will wonder why I didn’t come to him and I could get fired as well as him.
He later then called me confessing to what he was doing which I later explained to him that I needed to give him a written warning because the owner scott had called me explaining that he has noticed some major number changes and computer errors with products and date changes. At this point and time I had to pull him aside the next time he worked and let him know he had to put his two weeks in rather then be fired because that would go on his file.
He was really upset but I tried to tell him friendship aside you did this and knowone else did but you and if I would have talked to the boss I would have been fired because of your actions. After all was said and done he apologized to the owner and accepted the consqeunces for his actions. The decision I made to allow him two more weeks for me was the right thing to do people make mistakes in life and in the job world especially when we are younger. He got two more weeks of pay being fired didn’t go on his file because of him putting in his two weeks. It also made me stand out as a resectable manager because I was fair and worked with people the right way I always tried to make the best of the bad situations I was put in there friends or not. But that being said we stayed friends to this day and joke about it now but he later came to me and respected what I had to do because it could’ve been worse and he said it helped him grow up a little more and helped him learn to take responsibility for actions as well as make better decisions in life.

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