Case1 (adapted from Trevino and Nelson, 2017)

You work for a pharmaceutical company for 15 years, before moving to a new company in the role of vice-president. The new company offers you 30% more per year and a bonus of €40,000. You find that the ethical culture of the new company is very different.

In the old company, every new marketing campaign was evaluated by a legal and regulatory team before being launched. If drugs were considered unsafe, they would be pulled. In the new company, you encounter sales representatives discussing bribing Doctors to provide their own brand of drugs. The sales reps also give Doctors their drugs for free, encourage them to charge them at full price, and keep the difference. These free samples aren’t accounted for, in violation of the law. You try to change the ethical culture by offering bonuses to reps who kept accurate records, but you meet with resistance from management and these bonuses are discontinued.

Questions:

1. Analyze the ethical culture of the two companies
2. Evaluate the culture change effort that you would have tried to undertake
3. What would this culture change effort take to succeed?
4. As vice-president of this company, please describe how you would follow each of the 8 Steps to Sound Ethical Decision Making in Business in this situation