Organizational Justice, Ethics, and Corporate Social Responsibility

Learning
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Identify four different forms of organizational justice and the organizational impact of
each.
Describe strategies that can be used to promote organizational justice.
Explain what is meant by ethical behavior and why organizations should be concerned
about ethics.
Explain ways of behaving ethically when conducting business internationally.
Describe the individual and situational factors responsible for unethical behavior in
organizations and methods for minimizing such behavior.
Explain what is meant by corporate social responsibility, the forms it takes, and the
nature of the relationship between responsible behavior and financial profitability.
Preview Case
The NFL: The National “Fairness” League?
Parents always admonish children to “play fairly,” and doing so is expected of them even
more emphatically if they grow up to be athletes. Indeed, the sanctity of athletic events is
predicated on fairness. For an athlete to gain an unfair advantage by taking performanceenhancing
drugs or by breaking a rule (e.g., using a “corked bat” in baseball) is not tolerated
because it gives him or her an unfair advantage. Likewise, in recent years, many fans
and analysts of college football have taken issue with the Bowl Championship Series
(BCS) formula used to determine the national championship team on the grounds that it
does not always identify the absolute best team. So outraged was Utah’s Senator Orin
Hatch about the BCS formula that in the fall of 2003 he criticized the BCS method “for
calling into question the notion of basic fairness.”
One organization that has gone out of its way to ensure “a level playing field” for athletics
is the National Football League (NFL), professional football’s official governing
body. Within the NFL, a Competition Committee (composed of officials such as team
owners and managers) is always tweaking the rules so as to make the game as fair as possible.
As an example, consider the simple coin toss used to determine which team will kick
or receive the ball when a game begins. For 22 years, this was accomplished by having the
captain of the visiting team call “heads or tails” as a coin was tossed into the air by a referee
before the game. Then something happened. On Thanksgiving 1998, referee Phil
Luckett misunderstood the call made by the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Jerome Bettis, allowing
the Detroit Lions to get possession of the ball at the beginning of a critical overtime period.
To avoid such an “unfortunate incident” in the future, as then-NFL Commissioner Paul
Tagliabue called it, the procedure was changed. Starting with the following weeks’ games,
the heads-or-tails calls were made before the coin was tossed, thereby allowing any uncertainties
to be addressed before the outcome was determined.
Although this is a seemingly small thing, it can make a big difference because of the
“sudden death” method used to determine winners of NFL games that are tied after the regulation
60 minutes have been played. This procedure has the teams play until one team
breaks the tie by scoring. At this point, although the other team might not get the ball, the
game is over (unlike baseball, in which both the top and bottom halves of extra innings are
played if necessary to determine a winner). For this reason, it follows that teams entering
an overtime period will desire to possess the ball first. As you might imagine, however, this
practice has been called into question by some critics who believe it puts too much weight
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