Pinto Fires

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Recommended: Role of ethics in organizations

Observing the Pinto Fires Case, a direct violation of moral standards and unethical corporate behavior has occurred. This brings to mind the question of what caused this cognitive dissonance with Dennis A. Gioia and his group of decision makers. While Dennis had a set in stone standard of morals before joining the corporate world, the belief in his group‘s inherent morality and decision at the time was based on dollars and cents instead of all the factors that should go into a decision of this sort. If Dennis and his group were fully aware of all data collected they might have been able to make an optimizing decision. Instead they had to make, what was thought to be a rationalized optimal decision based off of incomplete data creating an un-recognized …show more content…

Whyte, author of the classic sociological commentary "The Organization Man," coined the term groupthink in a 1952 article that appeared in Fortune magazine in reference to the culture of conformity that shaped many corporations after World War II (Blank 2014). Psychologist Irving Janis later described group think using well know historical event like Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs (Schermerhorn Pg. 351). Groupthink strives toward achieving consensus within groups by minimizing conflict. In an environment of groupthink, minimizing conflict becomes the primary goal rather than producing concrete results or achieving true consensus (Blank 2014). Groupthink often results when a company becomes ingrained in its thinking and start rationalizing unpleasant and disconfirming data (Schermerhorn Pg. 350). In such cases, drastic measures are necessary to break the grip of groupthink. Groupthink suppresses individual thought, and innovation or rationalization is often a casualty (Blank 2014). As a result, organizations often fail to see or respond to the crisis as they did in the Pinto Fires Case. Ford and Dennis’s group left out rationalization in caring for people and their lives, leaving them with placing a value on human life rather than keeping in mind the key elements of the responsibilities of a

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