Working for My Cup or the House?

1) Working for My Cup or the House?
For those who are not familiar with the service industry, employees are paid minimally by the company they work for and their pay rate is determined by the tips received from customers. As a bartender, a person is exposed to having to deal with all sorts of peoples needs as well as employee competition and standard operating procedures set forth by management. Every time a drink is poured, a decision must be made whether to follow company standards or give away extra alcohol in order to receive a larger tip.

When first being promoted to bartender at an established golf resort, I witnessed firsthand the different factors that can affect ones pour. A pour can be defined as how much liquor is added to a customers drink. The three factors that affect ones pour are as follows: comparisons to other employees pours, the requests of customers for extra pours with compensation of a larger tip, and what the company designates as a pour.

When working as a team or having repeat customers, bartenders are compared based on their pour. If one bartender uses two pours and another uses one pour (the latter is the standard for the company), the rule-following bartender is not viewed as favorably as the one using the larger pour. This is clearly reflected in tips from customers. Similarly, the customer might say, Put a little extra in there and Ill take care of you. The employee is put on the spot to choose between the company and him or herself.

The bartender with the heavier pour or who gives away drinks for free may receive more money in their tip cup but the company suffers from lost revenues. If a bartender makes an average of 100 drinks a night and uses two pours instead of one for each drink, that bartender is giving away 100 drinks worth of alcohol each night which reduces nightly revenues, and has a huge effect on yearly liquor revenues.

In this highly competitive and profitable industry, over pouring is a practice that can cripple a business. As the newest bartender, one wants to fit in with the other bartenders and earn as much money as possible though it costs the company or house profits. Which is more important, filling your own tip cup or maximizing the houses profits that does not directly benefit the bartender?

Is it ethical to over pour customers drinks in order to develop better customer relations to earn more tips at the expense of company revenues? Are the bartenders using the entitlement mentality here to justify their self-serving actions? Do bartenders have a right to take care of their own cups ( Need a 70-80 word response.

2) Monitoring the Monitors
News leaks seemed to plague Hewlett Packard. The first leaks surrounded the ouster of chairwoman and chief executive Carly Fiorina. In the midst of this internal turmoil, The Wall Street Journal published an article with details of closed-door board discussions about the planned management reorganization. An external legal counsel interviewed board members but did not succeed in identifying the leak. Evidence of more leaks appeared a year later as news organizations once again described the deliberations of closed-door board and senior management meetings in extensive detail. It was clear that someone from inside was leaking information. In addition to board members, reporters from such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, and CNET became targets of the ensuing investigation into ten different leaks. The methods used to try to plug these news leaks led eventually to a board shake-up, which included the departure of nonexecutive chairwoman Patricia Dunn.

Fast forward to 2013, and another company, J. C. Penney, was involved in a story about board leaks. J. C. Penney director and activist investor William Ackman allegedly provided a news outlet information about board meetings, detailing discussions about his frustration with the CEO search process. In another example, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors in 2014 removed a trustee when he allegedly leaked information about candidates in the search for a new chancellor.

Investigating board members is a difficult proposition. Coming back to the HP example, the board could not supervise what was essentially an investigation of themselves. Neither could the employees handle the investigation because that would have put them in the untenable position of investigating their own bosses. Left with few options, HP board chairwoman Dunn turned the investigation over to a network of private investigators. According to Dunn, she could not supervise the investigation because she was a potential target. Dunn asked the head of corporate security to handle the investigation, as this was the person who handled employee investigations, but he still had conflicts of interest as an employee of the board. So the company outsourced the investigation to a network of outside investigators, telling them to conduct it within the confines of the law.

The primary source of the leaks was uncovered, but questions remained about the process of the investigations. Although no recording or eavesdropping occurred, investigators had used a form of pretexting to elicit phone records. Pretexting is a way of obtaining information by disguising ones identify. In this case, investigators used pretexting to obtain phone records of not only HP board members but also reporters who covered the story. In addition, investigators followed board members and journalists and watched their homes. They also planted false messages with journalists in an effort to get them to reveal their sources inadvertently through the tracking software included in the fake messages.

a) Who should be responsible for taking action when a board member engages in problematic behavior? If the chairperson is responsible, when should he or she involve the whole board? What are the costs of early full board involvement? What are the costs of late full board involvement? ( provide a 70-80 word response)

b) How might things have evolved differently if the ethicality rather than the legality of the practice had been the issue? Are the two synonymous or is there a difference? (provide a 70-80 word response)

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