PHL 736 Week 8 Ethics and Influence Strategy Example

Influence With Integrity: An Ethics and Influence Strategy for a Growing Food Company

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PHL/736: Political Acumen and Ethics

Week 8 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The learner, the company and all situations and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Across the course's seven weeks, Platte Valley Foods' invented head of corporate affairs analyzed the politics, regulation, public policy, social responsibility, community relations, international ethics and internal culture surrounding the company's $140 million Grand Island expansion. This paper turns those analyses into one strategy for how the company exercises influence and keeps its integrity.

Five Principles

Tell the truth to every audience: regulators, councils, customers, workers and communities receive accurate, complete information, including bad news.

Match political positions to stated values: the company takes no political position it would be unwilling to defend publicly against its own commitments.

Address our own impacts first: social responsibility begins with safety, water and housing pressures the company creates, before philanthropy.

Give affected people a voice: workers and communities have real input into decisions that affect them.

One standard of integrity across borders: core standards on bribery and labor rights apply everywhere, with local discretion only within them.

Compliance and Integrity

Paine (1994) contrasted compliance-based ethics programs, which emphasize preventing legal violations through rules, monitoring and penalties, with integrity-based approaches, which combine legal compliance with an emphasis on managerial responsibility for ethical behavior, shared values and organizational systems that support them. Paine argued that compliance alone may prevent some wrongdoing but does little to build the trust and judgment organizations need, while integrity strategies can do both.

The company's strategy uses both. Compliance covers legal requirements: anti-bribery rules, employment verification, safety and environmental law, political contribution limits. Integrity covers what law does not reach: positions on line speeds, voluntary targets, community partnership and speak-up culture. Week 7 showed what happens without integrity systems: an anti-retaliation policy existed on paper but was not trusted on the floor.

The Leader's Role

Treviño et al. (2000) found through interviews with executives and ethics officers that leaders earn a name for ethical leadership only when others see them in two ways at once: as moral persons, honest people who act rightly and care about others, and as moral managers, who talk openly about ethics, model it where others can see and reward or discipline conduct accordingly. Without the second pillar, executives may be seen as ethically neutral even when personally ethical.

Brown et al. (2005) built and tested a scale for ethical leadership, reasoning from social learning theory, proposing that employees learn ethical behavior by observing credible leaders, and found ethical leadership related to employees' perceptions of leader honesty, interactional fairness and willingness to report problems to management.

For the vice president and the CEO, the moral manager role means visible actions: the CEO speaking at every shift after the injury, the decision to decline the line-speed letter explained to employees, supervisors' bonuses changed to reward safety reporting.

Employees decide what the company values by watching what happens to the person who stops the line.

Integrating the Earlier Work

Political acumen and regulatory engagement fall under the first principle: an information-based approach to regulators and the council. Public policy falls under the second: support for the housing bill, refusal of the line-speed campaign and disclosure of contributions. CSR and community involvement fall under the third and fourth: materiality, targets, the housing partnership and the advisory council. International ethics falls under the fifth. The transformation from Week 7 runs through all of them, since a company whose workers fear speaking up cannot claim the first principle.

Resolving a Conflict

One conflict emerged in integration. The expansion schedule, which the board wants to protect, could be delayed by the safety transformation and by the decision to address wastewater capacity fully before filing. The strategy resolves this in favor of the principles: the CEO's public statement that the timeline will adjust for safety stands, and the board has accepted a three-month contingency in the expansion plan.

Testing the Strategy on a New Decision

A test arrived during the course. A large grocery customer offered a three-year contract for prepared meals at a volume that would require running the new line at its maximum designed speed from the first month. Under the old approach, sales would have accepted and operations would have pushed. Under the strategy, the ethics council asked whether the volume could be met safely during ramp-up, given Week 7's commitments. The answer was not yet. The company proposed a phased volume schedule, explained its reasons to the customer and accepted a smaller first-year commitment. The customer, whose own supplier code emphasizes worker safety, agreed to the phased schedule.

Communicating the Strategy

Principles matter only if people know them and see them used. The strategy will be explained at every shift meeting in the languages workers actually speak, included in supervisor training and posted with examples of decisions it shaped, such as the line-speed letter and the customer contract. Customers and community partners will receive a short written summary as well.

Governance

Board governance committee: approves the political activity policy, receives an annual integrity report and reviews association memberships.

Executive ethics council: CEO, vice president of corporate affairs, general counsel, chief operating officer and head of human resources; meets monthly; owns the strategy.

Plant safety and speak-up council: from Week 7, reports to the ethics council.

Community advisory council: from Week 5, advises on community decisions.

Compliance officer: manages the code, hotline, gift register and supplier audits.

Resources

Funding matters as much as structure, and the budget is fairly modest.

The strategy redirects part of the philanthropic budget to housing and adds a community relations coordinator, a compliance analyst and funds for ergonomic engineering and supplier audits, roughly $1.4 million a year, much of it offset by lower injury and turnover costs.

Measures

Recordable injury rate and near-miss reports; the share of workers who say concerns can be raised without penalty; community survey on whether the company keeps commitments; supplier audits passed; political contributions disclosed; hotline reports, investigation times and substantiated retaliation cases. The integrity report will publish them annually, including where targets are missed.

Two-Year Timeline

First six months: code revision, political activity policy, councils formed, supervisor incentive change, materiality assessment. Months 7 to 12: first community report, supplier remediation in Vietnam, housing partnership signed. Year two: first public responsibility report, independent review and adjustment of targets.

Reflection

The vice president began the course seeing politics as a set of hurdles for the expansion. She ends it seeing influence and integrity as inseparable: the company's ability to win approvals, attract workers and keep customers depends on whether others believe what it says. Her own lesson from Week 1, that she missed the politics inside her own hallway, became a commitment to listen first inside the company.

Conclusion

Five principles, a combined compliance and integrity approach, leaders who act as both moral persons and moral managers, clear governance, resources and measures form an ethics and influence strategy that can guide the company through its expansion and beyond.

References

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Paine, L. S. (1994). Managing for organizational integrity. Harvard Business Review, 72(2), 106-117.

Treviño, L. K., Hartman, L. P., & Brown, M. (2000). Moral person and moral manager: How executives develop a reputation for ethical leadership. California Management Review, 42(4), 128-142. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166057