MGMT 8415M Week 9 Dilemma Paper Example

Jobs in the Village or Clean Water in the Township: A Dilemma Paper on Whether a Processor Should Keep Its Oldest Plant Running While Its Spray Fields Load Neighbors' Wells, With a Third Option Tested, a Choice and What the Losing Claim Is Still Owed

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8415M: Socially Conscious Leader

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Jobs in the Village or Clean Water in the Township: A Dilemma Paper on Whether a Processor Should Keep Its Oldest Plant Running While Its Spray Fields Load Neighbors' Wells, With a Third Option Tested, a Choice and What the Losing Claim Is Still Owed

Two Duties, Stated Alike

Sawyer Creek Foods' board must decide by September 2026 whether to keep the Ellery plant operating at full seasonal volume for the next five years. Two obligations bear on the decision.

The first is owed to Ellery's workers and the village. The plant employs 140 people year-round and about 450 seasonally, making it the village's largest employer by far. Many families have arranged their lives around it over decades, and the village's water and sewer utility depends on the plant's fees. The ground of the duty is reliance the company has invited: it has recruited, trained and promised continuity in public statements for years.

The second is owed to about 40 households in the surrounding township whose private wells draw from groundwater the plant's wastewater spray fields help load with nitrate. The ground is harm: the plant, by its own operations, contributes to contamination above the drinking water standard in 14 wells. The term's externality analysis estimated the spray fields' share at 30 to 60 percent. The stakes for those households are not speculative: the federal standard exists because of the risk to infants, and a review of later research found possible links to other outcomes as well (Ward et al., 2018).

Framing the Conflict

Kidder (1995) distinguished moral temptations, right versus wrong, from genuine dilemmas, right versus right, in which two core values each make a legitimate claim. He described common patterns, among them individual versus community and short term versus long term. This decision has elements of both: the village's economic life against the township's water, the plant's present operation against the aquifer's future. Badaracco (1997) argued that such decisions, which he called defining moments, reveal and shape the character of the people and organizations that make them, and that they cannot be settled by applying a rule. Both accounts warn against treating one claim as obviously trivial.

A Third Option, Tried Honestly

Before choosing, the paper tests whether a third option avoids the conflict. Three were examined. Building an anaerobic pretreatment system at Ellery would remove most nitrogen before spraying, at an estimated capital cost of $4.2 million and about $300,000 a year to operate. Trucking part of the wastewater to the Ransom Falls plant's larger treatment system would reduce loading by about a third at about $450,000 a year. Rotating spray fields to land farther from the township would require leasing new acreage the company has not been able to secure.

Pretreatment comes closest to dissolving the dilemma. But the company's analysis shows that adding its cost to Ellery's operations would leave the plant losing money in two of the last five seasons, and the board has signaled that a plant losing money in average years will be closed. The third option therefore reduces the conflict without removing it: the company can protect the water and keep the plant, but only by accepting a lower return on Ellery than it accepts elsewhere.

The Choice

The paper recommends keeping Ellery open with pretreatment installed, accepting the lower return, and treating the township's water as the claim that limits how the plant may operate rather than whether it may operate. The reasoning runs from the grounds. The harm to well users is ongoing and physical, and it lands on households that never agreed to it and cannot avoid it except at their own expense. The reliance of Ellery's workers is real but can be honored as long as the plant runs. Of the two, the duty not to cause physical harm is more stringent, but it does not require closing the plant; it requires stopping the harm. Where the company can do both, it should, even at a lower return.

What the Losing Claim Is Still Owed

The losing claim here is in part the shareholders' claim to the plant's former return and in part the township's claim to immediate relief, since pretreatment will take two seasons to build. During construction, the company owes the township drinking water treatment for every affected household and testing every six months. If the board instead decides to close Ellery, Ellery's workers would be the losing claim, and they would be owed what reliance requires: a year's notice, priority hiring at Ransom Falls with transport during the season, severance scaled to years of service and support for the village utility's transition.

The Price of Choosing

Pretreatment costs $4.2 million up front and $300,000 a year, reducing Ellery's average annual contribution by about a third. Interim water treatment adds about $20,000. The price of the alternative, closing Ellery, would fall on 590 workers and a village; the price of continuing without pretreatment would fall on households drinking water above the standard.

References

Badaracco, J. L., Jr. (1997). Defining moments: When managers must choose between right and right. Harvard Business School Press.

Kidder, R. M. (1995). How good people make tough choices: Resolving the dilemmas of ethical living. William Morrow.

Ward, M. H., Jones, R. R., Brender, J. D., de Kok, T. M., Weyer, P. J., Nolan, B. T., Villanueva, C. M., & van Breda, S. G. (2018). Drinking water nitrate and human health: An updated review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(7), Article 1557. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15071557