Ethical Decision Making - Research Paper Example

Higher education is not like other industries. It includes a number of educational aspects such as; academics, human resources, sports, housing, food services, health care, business, legal compliance, security, research and development, international affairs, economic development, and legislative affairs. The higher education industry deals with all these educational endeavors with contrasting interests, the allocation of resources among these endeavors gives rise to an ethical dilemma for the decision makers.

The functions and people involved in each of these endeavors compete for critical resources as each endeavor is considered to be important by the people involved in it. However, the leadership is faced by the problem of deciding which educational endeavor to be given more or less of the overall resources. It is the responsibility of the leaders to determine what and how every function of higher education receives an equitable share of the limited resources within an institution. The following report will consider the factors that should be considered by the leaders before making decisions regarding allocation of resources and the issues inherent in such decisions.

Administrative Function Administrative function of an organization consists of the performance management which is responsible for making and implementing major decisions of the organization. In case of higher education, the administrative function is responsible for the management of all the educational endeavors undertaken by the institute. The major operation of the administrative function is to manage and allocate the available resources to the educational endeavors. The resource that are allocated include; the teaching faculty, the space i.e. the classrooms, funds for curricular and extra-curricular activities, and funds for maintenance of each faculty.

The ethical dilemma faced by the administrative function is the equitable distribution of resources available. There are a number of educational endeavors run by the administrative function at the same time and each endeavor holds significance for the teaching faculty and students in the respective function. It may not be ethical for the administrative function to allocate more resources to one function and less to the other however in certain circumstances it becomes necessary for such allocation as some functions are more demanding as compared to others.

Some functions require an extensive intervention of practical aspect along with the theoretical therefore the administrative function needs to allocate extra funds to such function so that the practical activities may be carried out properly. This situation may cause a lack of funds for other functions. Similarly, some educational endeavors may require a highly experienced teaching staff while the others may not rely on the teaching staff significantly. In this case, the administrative function is faced by the ethical dilemma regarding the allocation of teaching staff.

It may be unfair for other functions if one or some of the functions get a highly experienced teaching staff. Ethical Decision Making Ethical decision making is the making of decisions after proper consideration of all the ethical implications of the decisions (Ford et al., 1994). In the case described above, the administrative function needs to exercise ethical decision making in order to deal with the ethical dilemmas regarding the proper allocation of resources among different