Case 8: Should Labor Practices of Multinationals be Judged by the Standards of their Home Country or the Country of Operation?
A group of representatives from one of Germany's largest labor unions, marched on one of Amazon's eight German distribution centers. Armed with 37,000 petition signatures, the group demanded a meeting with Amazon executives to negotiate a union wage contract for its German workforce. Amazon, which employs 8,000 people in Germany, has refused to communicate with union officials, emphasizing that it already pays above the union rate. The union has protested the "Big Brother" atmosphere where "everything is measured, everything is calculated, everything is geared toward efficiency." The union is also protesting the treatment of the 10,000 temporary workers that Amazon buses in from Spain and Romania to meet Christmas demand, citing German legislation, introduced in 2005 that lowered labor regulations, as a main contributor to the problem. Amazon is quickly becoming despised for personifying the qualities of American-style management that Germans despise. "People want to be treated with respect," argues the union leader.
1. Should Amazon insist on American-style management in Germany?
Response: Since Amazon is an American company, it is not so possible to entirely abandon its American-style management. However, it needs to make some improvement on employee relations, have more communication with the local union officials, and make some adjustment in its management according to local situations.
2. In general, should firms adopt local customs in its operations?
Response: In general, firms should adopt local customs in its operations. This shows the respect to local employees, customers and cultures, which helps gain more interest, attention, cooperation, business and loyalty from the local people. The management also will be more effective and efficient if the local employees feel more motivation and respect from this act.

Case 11: Caught in the Middle: Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?
Cindy recently graduated and was working in a sales position in a growing tech company. She worked very closely with her team and had a good rapport with them. She was the only woman on the team, but she still felt at ease with her colleagues. Part of her job involved traveling across the country and going to meetings and events outside of work with her team and other sales people from different organizations.
During certain non-customer, internal events, she noticed that some of her married co-workers were bringing women other than their wives. Although she was uncomfortable with the situation, she wanted to keep her distance so as not to become too directly involved with her co-workers and their personal decisions. She had knowledge of what was going on but didn't think it was her place to intervene.
One day, at an office party, the wife of one of her co-workers approached her. She wanted to know exactly what was going on during these trips. Cindy was frustrated to be put in this situation by her co-workers and she didn't know what to say. Should she put herself in the middle of a coworker's marriage and tell the truth about the situation? Is there another option? She didn't want to damage the team and be looked at as an outsider. She knew that she was not involved at all in these behaviors, but she still felt very uneasy about the situation.
1. How should Cindy react in this situation?
Response: I think Cindy can say she is not clear about what was going on. Cindy just saw some possible signs on the events and they might happen for other reasons.
2. Is it Cindy's place to step in and say anything, or should she stay out of the situation all together?
I think Cindy should stay out of the situation. First, she probably does not know a lot of details about what was going on and there might be some misunderstanding about the situation. Second, this is her co-worker’s personal or domestic issue that is not proper for her to be involved without confirmed information. Third, stepping directly in the situation may affect her job and relation with co-workers.
3. With so many different loyalties, between her co-worker, her own values, her co-worker's wife, and her job, what is most important in this situation? Response: I think that in this situation, the best position for her is to stay with what her job responsibility is. This is a domestic issue between her co-worker and his wife, which is not something that would be detrimental to the community immediately. Therefore, it is better to let them cope with it themselves. If this issue might bring trouble to the company, it would also be proper for her to report to her supervisor or manager first. In a nutshell, I think it is more appropriate for her to not get involved directly.

Case 12: When Extra Attention Crosses the Line
Annie has been recently hired full time at a major tech company where she interned for two summers during her college career. Annie loves her job and has established many strong relationships with her co-workers over the time she has worked there. The company encourages the interns and new hires to interact with VPs and upper management in order to create an open and friendly atmosphere.
During her time as an intern, Annie began to notice that one of the VPs paid her extra attention. When he was around he would always make an extra effort to stop by Annie's cubicle and chat; something he did not do with any of the other interns. He reached out to her over social networking sites and even invited her to a gathering at his house. Some of her co-workers began to make offhand comments to Annie about the extra attention.
Now that she was in a full time position, Annie began to dread that she would soon have to work with this VP directly. While he has not done or said anything explicitly inappropriate, the extra attention—and the fact that her co-workers noticed it—made her very uncomfortable and undermined her concentration on work. When she was hired, she was told that she should always speak to her manager if she was uncomfortable or had issues with the work environment. While at the same time, she is afraid to come across like a tattletale since the VP hasn't explicitly done anything wrong.
1. What course of action should Annie take?
Response: I think Annie should focus on her job since nothing explicitly inappropriate the VP has done.
2. What are management’s obligations?
Response: If her manager has also noticed the offhand comments and that VP’s extra attention to Annie, it is his/her obligations to step out and learn more about what is going on. The manager should talk to Annie and the VP respectively, know what they are thinking about and come up with a solution.
3. Do you consider this a hostile work environment?
Response: I do not think that this is a hostile work environment. First, the policy about office dating/couple in this company is not clear. Some companies allow office romance. Maybe the VP is single and really wants to develop a normal romantic relationship with Annie, which is not against the rule. Second, the VP has not done something inappropriate explicitly yet. Annie can seek help from her direct manager or even communicate candidly with the VP about this awkward situation and find a way to resolve it properly.

Case 15: When Equality Compromises Efficiency
Ralph was a sales representative of a small but fast-growing mobile and social advertising platform. Working directly with the co-founder, Mike, Ralph was responsible for door-to-door sales, pitching the company's platform that helped clients gain a virtual following of customers.
The business owners in the area often spoke English as a second language, making clear communication between the two parties a key concern for Ralph. On one sales call, Ralph approached a small hair salon and secured a contract along with a $100 signup fee. However, the situation soon turned sour, as the hairdresser was furious after learning that she would have to operate the online platform herself, as opposed to the full service deal she thought she had signed.
Mike, Ralph's boss, now found himself stuck in tough situation. Ralph claimed that he was blatantly clear what the contract was offering, though mentioned communication was strained due to the language barrier. Under the company's philosophy of putting the customer first, Mike refunded the $100 signup fee and voided the contract.
This was not the first time Mike had to refund a contract under these conditions, causing Mike to revisit both the contract and Ralph's sales pitch to ensure that the language was a clear as possible. After this incident, it was clear that adjustments have not made an impact, and the company continued to lose money on negated contracts and time wasted not pursuing interested customers. Mike began to consider redrawing their target areas away from those where English is not the predominantly spoken language, but is concerned that would be an injustice to those potential customers.
1. Should Mike make the decision to work only with English-speaking customers?
Response: Mike should not make this decision. This will undermine his potential business.
2. Is that an ethical solution?
Response: Mike’s decision is not an ethical solution. It is not fair to those customers who speak English as a second language, but want to use their services.
3. Are there any alternatives?
Response: Mike can ire someone who speak fluently both English and the local language to be an interpreter and help with the business in this area.

Case 16: When Incentives Don’t Match Your Values
Frank, a recent graduate, recently landed a sales job for a Silicon Valley tech company. He is part of a team that qualifies sales opportunities. After talking to potential customers, Frank decides whether or not they are quality leads. If they are, he refers them to an account executive to close the deal, saving the company precious time in money in avoiding low probability contracts. If not, he will not pass them on and the sales opportunity is not pursued. Account executives expect prescreening of potential leads in order to maximize their time. Each referral Frank passes to the account executive is added to a tally that counts toward his target monthly total, and there is a monetary bonus for all sales staff members who reach their monthly quota.
This creates some controversy among Frank's team members, who are faced with conflicting incentives; pass on low quality leads to hit your quota, or focus on quality and risk missing the monthly target. The pressure to "hit your number" comes from both the monetary incentive and management, who benefit when their sales team hits their quotas. To further complicate matters, since each sales representative self-reports how many leads they passed along, they can inflate their numbers in order to reach the monthly target goal; a common occurrence among Frank's coworkers.
As Frank tries to adjust to his new job, he is finding it difficult to balance his own moral compass with the pressure of hitting his monthly number.
1. How would you handle the dilemma between hitting the quota and submitting quality work you stand behind?
Response: I would rather insist on submitting quality work.
2. What factors would weigh into your decision?
Response: First, my own value tells me that I should not lie about my work just so I can obtain short-term benefits. Second, it is not doing the company good by making up the quota, which will show to the public eventually.
3. What solutions would best solve this dilemma?
Response: Frank can work harder to reach the goal as much as possible and in the meantime maintain quality work. He can also report to the upper management of the company about this situation and let the management deal with this issue.
4. Do other measures exist to evaluate the performance of the members of Frank’s team?
Response: There should be some supervision on the sales representative’s report either by other members or a manager to ensure the quality of the work and the validity of the quota.