Cases 1

Rio grande supply company

Jasper Hennings, president of Rio Grande Supply Company, knew full well that a company’s top excecutives were largely responsible for detirmining a firm’s corporate culture. That’s why he took such personal pride in the culture of his Texas-based wholesale plumbing supply company. It didn’t just pay lip service to the values it expoused: integrity, honesty, and a respect for each individual employee. His management team set a good example by living those principles. At least that’s what he’d believed until the other day. The importance Jasper attached to respecting each individual wasapparent in the company’s Internet use policy. It was avundantly clear that employees wenren’t to use Rio Grande’s computers for anything but business-related activities. However, Jasper himself had avetoed the inclusion of what was becoming a standard provision in such policies that management had the right toa cess and review anything employees created, stored , sent, or received on company equipment. He cut short any talk of installing software filters. Still, the company reserved the right to take disciplinary action, including possible termination, and to press criminal charges if an employee was found to have violated the policy. So how was Jasper to square hos cherised assumptions about his management team with what he’d just discovered? Henry Darger, his hard-working chief of operations and a member of his church, had summarily fired a female employee for having accessed another worker’s e’mail surreptiously. She hadn’t taken her dismissal well. ”Just ask Darger what he’s up to when hes huts his office door,” she snarled as she stormed out of Jasper’s office. She made what Jasper hoped was an idle threat to hire a lawyer. When Jasper asked Henry what the fired employee could possibly have meant, tears began to roll down the operation chief’s face. He admitted that ever since a young nephew had comitted suicide the year before and a business he...