According to my perspective, the employees and managers behaved that way for a number of obvious reasons. The foremost was the pressure to make high profits, as well as, to meet the impractical and unhealthy production quota of slaughtering 500 cows every day. In addition to that, the employees were told that they would be only able to get their salaries and sustain their jobs, if they will meet the defined target. As revealed by one of the employees, the supervisors pressurized employees to slaughter and processed 500 cows no matter what it takes as cost in order to meet the sales and profit benchmarks provided by the meatpacking market. This target was required to be followed on daily basis, which consequentially placed an intense pressure on employees making them to close their eyes from all unethical activities that were taking place within the production proximity (Daft, 2012).
The employees of Westland/Hallmark Meat Co further revealed that they were confined to follow the instructions of their supervisors as they had no say in the production and management matters. The entire situation and excessive work pressure make employees to ignore morality and ethical demeanor of performing their jobs. All they think was to meet their targets so that they can keep up their jobs and wages. Therefore, in order to meet their targets, they destitute several ethical procedures and direction such as abused animals and slaughtered them when they are sick in spite of being fully aware of the fact that their product is used by national lunch program. This meant that their products could affect thousands of children and other individual buyers (Jones, 2010).
There are a number of steps that the managers should have undertaken to avert these problems from arising and befalling. For instance, the first and the foremost step that plant managers could take was the implementation of code of ethics in case the company does not have one. The enactment of an ethical code could enable managers and employees to reject such unethical acts on the basis of their humanoid morale as their children got equally affected by the unethical practices of the company. Secondly, although managers and employees have a big part of responsibility; however, the local and national authorities such as those who were looking for the national lunch program should practice more authority and power in monitoring and checking products such as meat. Thirdly, in order to inhibit recurrence of such kind of problem, an authoritarian monitoring system is required at every stage that takes in all the procedures ranging from the cattle farming to packaging and distribution to end product (Jones, 2010).
References
Daft, R. (2012). Organization Theory and Design. Nelson Education. Retrieved on August 31, 2016
Jones, G. R. (2010). Organizational Theory, Design, and Change. Upper Saddle River: Pearson. Retrieved on August 31, 2016
