IOP 455 Week 5 Ethical Decision-Making Case Analysis Example

Predicting Which Nurses Will Quit: An Ethical Decision-Making Analysis of a Workforce Analytics Project

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

IOP/455: Professional Ethics

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospital system, project and staff are composites written for a model paper; ethical models and research come from the sources listed.

Ethical decisions at work are rarely simple. They involve uncertain facts, competing interests and pressure to act quickly. A structured decision-making process helps practitioners reason clearly and explain their choices. This final paper applies such a process to a workforce analytics proposal at the Tucson hospital system followed through the course.

The Case

Nurse turnover at the hospital system has reached twenty-two percent a year, costing millions in recruiting and agency staffing. The chief operating officer proposes a flight-risk model: an analytics vendor would combine badge swipe data showing arrival and departure patterns, overtime and sick-day records, schedule-change requests and individual engagement survey answers to give each nurse a score from one to one hundred. Managers would receive scores for their units monthly and could "intervene early" with high-risk nurses. Dr. Naomi Reyes is asked to validate the model and help roll it out.

Step One: Recognizing the Ethical Issue

Rest (1986) proposed that ethical action requires four components: moral sensitivity, recognizing that a situation has ethical implications; moral judgment, deciding which action is right; moral motivation, giving priority to ethical values over other goals; and moral character, having the persistence to follow through. Failure at any step can produce unethical behavior.

The first challenge is recognizing that the proposal raises ethical issues at all; leaders see it as a retention tool. Jones (1991) proposed that people notice and act on an issue's ethical side more readily when the stakes feel heavy: when the harm is large, likely, soon, concentrated on a few people and close to the decision maker, a quality Jones called moral intensity. Here, harms are diffuse, uncertain and delayed, which lowers perceived intensity and helps explain why leaders have not seen the concerns.

Step Two: Facts and Stakeholders

Stakeholders include nurses, who would be scored without their knowledge; managers, who would receive scores and might treat high-risk nurses differently; patients, who depend on stable staffing; the hospital, which needs to reduce turnover; the vendor; and the profession of I-O psychology, whose standards Naomi represents. Key facts include the earlier promise that engagement survey answers would be reported only in aggregate, the absence of any validation of the vendor's model in nursing and the potential for scores to reflect protected characteristics, such as sick days associated with disability or pregnancy.

Step Three: Ethical Judgment

Several issues emerge. Using survey answers at the individual level would break the confidentiality promise discussed in Week 1. Sick days and schedule requests may reflect medical conditions, caregiving or pregnancy, raising the leave and disability concerns from Week 2; a model that flags these nurses could lead to discrimination. Without validation, scores may be inaccurate, the problem examined in Week 3. Nurses scored as high risk might be passed over for opportunities or treated with suspicion, a self-fulfilling cycle. And surveillance through badge data, without notice, may erode trust at a time when trust is already low.

All four frameworks from Week 1 point in the same direction. The consequences risk harm and lost trust; rights to privacy and to rely on promises are at stake; burdens would fall on nurses with health or family needs; and a person of integrity would not quietly score colleagues without their knowledge.

A nurse who swaps shifts to take her father to chemotherapy would look, to the model, like a nurse about to quit.

Step Four: Alternatives

Naomi considers three options. First, implement as proposed: fastest, but violates confidentiality, risks discrimination and lacks evidence. Second, refuse outright: protects nurses but leaves turnover unaddressed and may lead leaders to proceed without her. Third, redesign: use aggregated data, such as unit-level turnover, overtime and survey themes, to identify which units and conditions drive quitting, then fix those causes with input from nurses.

Step Five: Organizational Pressures

Treviño et al. (2006) surveyed the behavioral ethics literature and showed how personal traits combine with workplace forces, such as ethical climate, leadership, reward systems and pressure to meet goals, to shape ethical awareness and behavior. Leaders who model and reward ethical conduct encourage it; strong pressure to hit financial targets can push people toward rationalizing questionable choices.

Naomi faces exactly such pressure: leadership wants results quickly, and the vendor's demonstration was persuasive. Naming the pressure helps her hold to her judgment, the motivation and character components of Rest's model.

Step Six: Recommendation and Implementation

Naomi recommends the redesign. She presents the ethical, legal and practical risks of individual scoring, citing the APA standards on confidentiality and organizational services, and offers a unit-level analysis within six weeks. Nurses will be told how data are used. Interventions will target causes, such as chronic short staffing on certain units, unpredictable schedules and limited career paths, with retention interviews offered to all nurses rather than only those labeled high risk. Turnover will be tracked by unit to evaluate the changes.

Why Not Simply Validate the Model?

Leaders asked whether Naomi could fix the problems by testing the model's accuracy. Validation would answer only one question, whether scores predict quitting. Even an accurate model would still break the survey promise, could still flag nurses for protected reasons and would still change how managers treat people before they had done anything. Accuracy is necessary for an ethical tool but not sufficient, and a highly accurate model built on medical and caregiving signals could be more harmful, not less.

Reflection

Across the course, the same lesson recurs: ethical problems at work often arrive disguised as efficiency, and the I-O psychologist's role is to protect both people and the organization's legitimate goals. A structured process makes that role possible under pressure.

Conclusion

The flight-risk proposal raised issues of confidentiality, discrimination, validity and trust that leaders had not recognized, partly because its harms were diffuse and delayed. Applying a four-component model, attending to moral intensity and naming organizational pressures led to a redesigned project that addresses turnover through its causes rather than by scoring individual nurses.

References

Jones, T. M. (1991). Ethical decision making by individuals in organizations: An issue-contingent model. Academy of Management Review, 16(2), 366-395. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1991.4278958

Rest, J. R. (1986). Moral development: Advances in research and theory. Praeger.

Treviño, L. K., Weaver, G. R., & Reynolds, S. J. (2006). Behavioral ethics in organizations: A review. Journal of Management, 32(6), 951-990. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206306294258