DILEMMA AT DEVIL'S DEN

Dilemma at Devil's Den



Dilemma at Devil's Den

Introduction

Susan a business student at Mt Eagle College is working part time inside her campus snack bar 'The Devil's Den' which is managed by contract with an external Company College Food Service (CFS).

Student employees involved are those who worked at night shifts and on the weekends. They are students at the college and are under supervision of another student, who held the position of manager. There was approx 30 student employees and 6 student mangers employed by CFS to supervise the DEN. During the day time CFS employed full time managers (non students). Student managers are previous employees chosen by other student managers and they received no formal training or written rules beyond what they had already learned working there.

Susan was exasperated at the state of affairs and wanted to correct the wrong doings but she was unsure whether the management would do anything about it . Talking with employees was useless as they abuse rules themselves or clearly aware of what was going on but ignore it. It was very difficult for Susan, because she wanted to become a student manager next semester and did not want to create any negative waves that might prevent from doing so (Greene, 2009).

Background And Analysis Of Case

This case primarily deals with ethics and personal values system and how it affects one's reaction. It also depicts the behavioural influences of punishments and inefficiencies of the working organisation.

Susan is a student employee at Devil's Den which is managed by College Food Service (CFS) and she is in dilemma between choosing right and wrong based on her values and ethics.

She is aware about the food thefts going on in the snack bar which is against her values and needed to be stopped. But at the same time she has also in her mind some negative consequences on her desires for becoming the student manager in next semester.

CFS management was that the employees could eat what they wanted during working hours at the snack bar free of charge, but wrong implementation lead to the frequent theft of eatables from the storage room. Another problem that Susan pointed out is that no one paid attention to the behavior of the night shift employees that made a nuisance for morning shift employees, as they had to do all the closings for the previous night. Adding to this the low wages and inconsistent work schedule lowered the morale of employees making the situation extremely toxic.

Dilemma of values (content and strengths) ,the clash of what is required to be done at the workplace at the expense of the righteous approach according to her values and the consequences if the protagonist is willing to accept.

The protagonist is torn between whether to be an anonymous whistle blower or wait for the time until she becomes a manager to clean up the irregularities as she fears that whistle blowing upfront would hamper in her pursuit of becoming manager and she would be frowned upon by her peers and senior...