coca cola Essay

Submitted By RobinA4865
Words: 1016
Pages: 5

The Coca-Cola Company Struggles with Ethical Crises
HRM522

Delineate the ethical issues and dilemmas (as found in Chapter 3) the company faced.
Coca Cola is one of the largest international beverage companies. It is renowned by its brand name and working in more than 200 countries. Coca Cola has different brands under its name along with PowerAde, Minute Maid, and Dasani water. This company has excelled over the last ten years; however, in recent decades the company struggled to meet its financial objectives and has encountered a number of ethical crises (Ferrell, 2011).
Apparently it seems that the company is working fine, but it has run into numerous difficulties and in short has had ethical issues one after another, even with international recognition. The company’s problem began at the executive level where many areas of the organization lacked quality leadership that was lacking a series of ethical crises. Company has a bit weak leadership and was not strong enough to resolve the ethical issues. Due to the weaknesses within the organization ethical issues kept arising. Many board members lost faith in the company as well as employees and resigned from the company after it failed to conquer its challenges. According to Ferrell (2011) when Doug Ivester became CEO of the company he was groomed for the position by a former CEO, and his tenure did not last long in the company. Ivester was faced with many challenges and issues and unfortunately he was not equipped to handle the competition from others in the industry. There have been several CEO’s whose tenure did not last long and have also decided to resign from the organization after years of frustration over these ethical issues. Coca Cola however, had shown that they could not handle disputes or incidents whenever they occurred, there were slow responses, and failure to acknowledge the severity of situations that harmed the company’s reputation and management’s unprofessionalism. The company should have developed compliance and ethics programs; but instead these programs were developed after problems were reported. In order to improve upon their image, and permanently rise above its ethical problems, the company cannot focus on dominating the global market, but make necessary changes to avoid further problems in the future.

Determine which of the issues/dilemmas you identified was the most significant. Explain your reasoning.
Coca Cola has recoil and began to take necessary measures toward improving its image. The leadership managed much more different than other companies that had ethical issues (i.e. Enron) and the company focused more on the financial aspect of the company while other areas of the company crumbled. Even though, Enron was the biggest business scandals of all time, and Coca Cola displayed a leadership that is entrenched in helping the company maintain its global position, and its employees have shown strong interest in success. The company resolved its ethical issues and recovered from those issues.

Determine what steps Coca-Cola should have taken to prevent the issues you identified from arising in the first place.
Three steps Coca Cola should take to restore its reputation are the removal of racial discrimination in the organization, producing good quality products free from all contamination and a management team that follow rules, regulation and laws of the country. Although Coca Cola center its reputation mostly on the global impact of the company name, to restore its reputation and eliminate future ethical dilemmas with stakeholders, the leadership issue has to change along with poor financial performance, adoption of good ethical competitive strategy for the company and low turnover in top management. Coca Cola seems to be trying to institute its reputation based on quality products and socially responsible activities, the company has failed to manage ethical decision making in