Hrm at Crossroads

Case background:

- Bharat Dubey, a graduate of XLRI joined Tome Hydraulics

- His initial beliefs were

Imbibing the culture while maintaining individual identity

Loyalty to organization must come before anything else

Value trust and integrity

- Faced contradictions while trying to follow the above values in his early stint

- Started making compromises on those values

Disclosed the confidential report of employees

Created crisis artificially and then resolved it to gain mileage

- His decisions to circumvent policy and procedures come back to haunt him when is appointed as head of India operations. The worker unions have become to strong due to soft stances and frequently violation of processes.

- Eventually, he is introspecting on what he has become over the years

How strong was Bharat Dubey's ethical stamina? Low

- Started with an ethical stance, but after initial setbacks, realised that ethical path was laden with several impediments

- Not many evidences of him trying to escalate beyond his DM the issues pertaining to revealing employee confidential report against company policy

- Began to compromise on his principles as well company policies to get things done

- Went much further, indulged in sabotage by having to workers create an issue on the shop floor on his instructions, and later pitched in to resolve the issue to impress his boss – Fetched him promotion to DM position.

Is ethics at home different from ethics at work? Ethics are universal

- genesis is in moral values

- whether at home or away

- whether someone is watching or not

How effective was Business Ethics in Tome Hydraulics? Not effective

- GM of India operations laid emphasis on productivity at all costs

- The culture flowed downwards, DM was fine with working around the company policies if they served the purpose (unhindered operations)

- Frequent circumventing of the procedures by management resulted in erosion of business ethics

- No information available about existence of whistleblower policy

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