The insurance company you work for plans to raise all premiums for health care coverage for its customers. Your boss has asked you to proofread a letter she drafted to customers announcing the new, higher rates. The first two paragraphs discuss some exciting medical advances and the expanded coverage offered by the company. Only in the final paragraph do customers learn that they must pay more for coverage starting next year. Describe the ethical implications of this draft. What changes would you suggest? If your boss tells you not to make content changes, what will you do, and why? The insurance company you work for plans to raise all premiums for health care coverage for its customers. Your boss has asked you to proofread a letter she drafted to customers announcing the new, higher rates. The first two paragraphs discuss some exciting medical advances and the expanded coverage offered by the company. Only in the final paragraph do customers learn that they must pay more for coverage starting next year. Describe the ethical implications of this draft. What changes would you suggest? If your boss tells you not to make content changes, what will you do, and why? SUPPORT: Ethics are the accepted principles of conduct that govern behavior within a society. Ethical behavior is a companywide concern, but because communication efforts are the public face of a company, they are subjected to particularly rigorous scrutiny from regulators, legislators, investors, consumer groups, environmental groups, labor organizations, and anyone else affected by business activities. Ethical communication includes all relevant information, is true in every sense, and is not deceptive in any way. In contrast, unethical communication can distort the truth or manipulate audiences in a variety of ways. • • • • • • Plagiarizing. Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s words or other creative product as your own. Note that plagiarism can be illegal if it violates a copyright, which is a fo rm of legal protection for the expression of creative ideas.54 Omitting essential information. Your audience must have all the information necessar y to make an intelligent, objective decision. Selective misquoting. Distorting or hiding the true intent of someone else’s words is u nethical. Misrepresenting numbers. Statistics and other data can be unethically manipulated b y increasing or decreasing numbers, exaggerating, altering statistics, or omitting num eric data. Distorting visuals. Images can be manipulated in unethical ways, such as altering pho tos to deceive audiences or changing the scale of graphs and charts to exaggerate or c onceal differences. Failing to respect privacy or information security needs. Failing to respect the privac y of others or failing to adequately protect information entrusted to your care can als o be considered unethical (and is sometimes illegal). The widespread adoption of social media has increased the attention given to the issue of transparency, which in this context refers to a sense of openness, of giving all participants in a conversation access to the information they need to accurately process the messages they are receiving. In addition to the information itself, audiences deserve to know when they are being marketed to and who is behind the messages they read or hear. Document1 For example, with stealth marketing, companies recruit people to promote products to friends and other contacts in exchange for free samples or other rewards, without requiring them to disclose the true nature of the communication. This can range from paying consumers to give product samples as ‘gifts’ to paying popular Vine contributors to work products and brand names into the segments they post on the popular video-sharing service.55 Critics of stealth marketing, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), assert that such techniques are deceptive because they don’t give targets the opportunity to raise their instinctive defenses against the persuasive powers of marketing messages.56 Aside from ethical concerns, trying to fool the public is simply bad for business. As the LaSalle University communication professor Michael Smith puts it, ‘The public backlash can be long, deep, and damaging to a company’s reputation.’57 Some ethical questions are easy to recognize and resolve, but others are not. Deciding what is ethical can be a considerable challenge in complex business situations. An ethical dilemma involves choosing among alternatives that aren’t clear-cut. Perhaps two conflicting alternatives are both ethical and valid, or perhaps the alternatives lie somewhere in the gray area between clearly right and clearly wrong. Every company has responsibilities to multiple groups of people inside and outside the firm, and those groups often have competing interests. For instance, employees naturally want higher wages and more benefits, but investors who have risked their money in the company want management to keep costs low so that profits are strong enough to drive up the stock price. Both sides have a valid ethical position. The writers of this memo clearly want the company to continue funding their pet project, even though the marketing research doesn’t support such a decision. By comparing this memo with the version shown in Figure 1.12 (be sure to read the lettered annotations), you can see how the writers twisted the truth and omitted evidence in order to put a positive ‘spin’ on the research. In contrast, an ethical lapse is a clearly unethical choice. With both internal and external communication efforts, the pressure to produce results or justify decisions can make unethical communication a tempting choice. Telling a potential customer you can complete a project by a certain date when you know you can’t is simply dishonest, even if you need the contract to save your career or your company. There is no ethical dilemma here. 2 Document1 Compare the messages in Figures 1.11 and 1.12 for examples of how business messages can be unethically manipulated. ENSURING ETHICAL COMMUNICATION Ensuring ethical business communication requires three elements: ethical individuals, ethical company leadership, and the appropriate policies and structures to support employees’ efforts to make ethical choices.58 Moreover, these three elements need to work in harmony. If employees see company executives making unethical decisions and flouting company guidelines, they might conclude that the guidelines are meaningless and emulate their bosses’ unethical behavior. 3 Document1 Purchase answer to see full attachment Tags: customer behavior ethical implications Ethical communication insurance company health care coverage Student has agreed that all tutoring, explanations, and answers provided by the tutor will be used to help in the learning process and in accordance with our company’shonor code & terms of service.