Ethical Case Study: Working In Groups

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Ethical Case Study – Working in Groups In this essay, I will be exploring an ethical dilemma that often causes discourse in a group tasked with working together toward a common goal; one of the members is not contributing as much as the other members, causing the others to work harder to achieve their intended result. In this case study titled “Picking Up the Slack” by Wilson (2013), a man named Greg has good rapport with a girl named Natalie, and they have chosen to work together, along with others, on a project for their senior collegiate business class. Natalie is inattentive in discussions and often behind in her work on the project, so the others in the group choose not to confront her and dedicate themselves to working harder. Upon completion …show more content…
In the book Think Communication, Third Edition (2015), interdependence is a necessity when working as a group. (p. 180) Firstly, should Greg have been looking at his problem through the Utilitarian Approach, there was an immediate and apparent chance to reduce harm at the outset of the problem. In not speaking to Natalie about the problem, or by capitulating to the others in that “it would be more trouble than it’s worth to confront her about it” (Wilson, 2013, p. 1), Greg becomes implicit in passing a judgment of worth on Natalie, failing in another ethical approach: that of fairness or justice. At the very least, with his previous history in working as a colleague to Natalie in his collegiate courses, Greg would have the most responsibility to do what I would consider to be the right thing and simply talk to her, especially if he were considering the situation through the framework of the virtue approach. Through that oversight, his dilemma at the end of the project in providing a grade for Natalie’s work is one that has its roots in decisions made much earlier. In this frame of reference, I think the final answer lies with the utilitarian approach: cause the least harm, and do the most good. In another article from Santa Clara University, titled “Calculating Consequences: The Utilitarian Approach to Ethics” (2014) there is usually assumption when assigning values to benefits or costs with …show more content…
With better, more ethical decision making on the part of the team in the early stages of the project, the final resolution might have been much less difficult to