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WGU C717 Task 1 Example

Business Ethics Task 1: Organizational Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

 

Western Governors University

C717: Business Ethics

[Student Name] | [Student ID]

[Submission Date]

A. Organizational Overview

TechFite is a mid-sized technology corporation headquartered in Dellburg, a municipality that entered a formal public-private partnership with the company in hopes of revitalizing its local economy. The organization designs and manufactures consumer electronics and employs a workforce spanning both exempt salaried employees and hourly workers. Under the terms of the partnership agreement, TechFite accepted specific obligations that included community investment, support for youth leadership programming, and fair employment practices.

This analysis examines three intersecting ethical failures within TechFite’s operations: the deliberate reclassification of full-time employees to part-time status to sidestep benefit obligations, the abandonment of community investment promises made to the City of Dellburg, and a leadership culture that consistently prioritizes executive self-interest over accountability to broader stakeholders. These issues are evaluated through the lenses of stakeholder theory, Carroll’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework, and the ethical tradition of utilitarianism. Taken together, they paint a picture of an organization that has substituted short-term financial calculus for genuine ethical reasoning.

A1. Relevant Stakeholders

Understanding who bears the consequences of TechFite’s decisions is the starting point for any meaningful ethical analysis. The following stakeholders are directly or indirectly affected by the company’s conduct.

Employees (Primary). The employees most directly harmed by TechFite’s conduct are those reclassified from full-time to part-time status. This single administrative change stripped workers of access to employer-sponsored healthcare, paid leave accrual, and retirement contributions. For many hourly workers, these benefits represent a substantial portion of their total compensation. The reclassification was not the result of reduced hours or changing business needs; it was a deliberate cost-containment tactic. Workers were left to absorb the financial shock with little transparency or notice.

City of Dellburg and Local Government (Primary). Dellburg’s municipal government entered the public-private partnership with TechFite in good faith. City planners, budget officers, and elected officials shaped infrastructure timelines and youth program budgets around the assumption that TechFite would honour its commitments. When the company failed to deliver, it did not merely fall short of a voluntary pledge. It disrupted municipal planning cycles and eroded institutional trust in corporate partners. The damage here extends beyond money; it affects the city’s willingness to pursue future public-private collaborations.

Local Community and Youth Organizations (Secondary). Dellburg residents, and particularly youth served by the leadership programs TechFite pledged to fund, represent a secondary stakeholder group that suffered concrete harm. These are not abstract stakeholders. They are young people whose programming was delayed or cancelled because a corporation decided to redirect those funds internally. The community’s trust in TechFite as a civic partner was a resource that, once depleted, is difficult to rebuild.

Shareholders and Executive Leadership (Primary). Senior executives who structured self-directed bonus arrangements while eliminating employee benefits present a paradox: they appear to have benefited personally from the very decisions that generated ethical and legal risk for the organization. Shareholders, meanwhile, are exposed to growing litigation risk, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational damage that can suppress long-term stock value. The short-term financial relief generated by benefit cuts is likely to be outweighed by the downstream costs of turnover, litigation, and diminished public trust.

Customers (Secondary). Customers are not immediately harmed by TechFite’s internal decisions, but they are not insulated from the consequences either. When information about a company’s Labor practices or broken community commitments becomes public, it changes purchasing behaviour. Consumer trust is a downstream casualty of unethical corporate conduct, and in an era of social media transparency, that information travels faster than most crisis communications teams can manage.

B. Applicable Ethical Theory: Utilitarianism

The ethical framework best suited to evaluating TechFite’s situation is utilitarianism, grounded in the foundational work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In its modern articulation, utilitarianism holds that an action is morally justified when it produces the greatest aggregate welfare across all affected parties. The moral weight of a decision is not found in the intent of the actor or the rule being followed, but in the real-world distribution of benefit and harm that results.

Contemporary utilitarian scholarship has reinforced this outcome-cantered orientation. Scarre (2023) describes utilitarianism as a framework that evaluates rightness through the lens of impartial welfare maximization, meaning that decision-makers must account for all affected parties equally rather than privileging those who hold institutional power.

Applying this framework to TechFite’s employee reclassification reveals a clear ethical failure. The decision produced financial savings for the company and, indirectly, preserved executive bonuses. Yet it imposed healthcare insecurity, income instability, and planning anxiety on dozens or hundreds of workers and their families. Under utilitarian analysis, the aggregate harm produced by this decision is not even close to being offset by the benefits accruing to a small executive group. The arithmetic of welfare is unambiguous: more people were made substantially worse off than were made better off.

The unfulfilled community investment pledges yield the same utilitarian verdict. The infrastructure contributions and youth leadership sponsorships TechFite promised to Dellburg were designed precisely to produce wide-scale social benefit. When TechFite redirected those resources internally, it converted a commitment to broad community welfare into a private gain. Layton and Verdery (2022) note that corporate stakeholder obligations carry a distinctive moral weight when they are explicitly formalized, because stakeholders begin making planning decisions based on the expectation of fulfilment. That expectation was reasonable, and TechFite’s failure to meet it produced a measurable reduction in community welfare that a utilitarian framework cannot excuse.

It is worth noting that utilitarianism does not condemn profit-seeking. TechFite’s economic survival benefits employees, suppliers, and the regional economy. The utilitarian critique is not that TechFite sought to contain costs, but that it chose cost-containment strategies whose burdens fell disproportionately on the most economically vulnerable stakeholders while protecting the most advantaged ones. A utilitarian approach would have required the company to explore cost-reduction options that distributed the sacrifice more evenly and preserved the community commitments that generated the widest social benefit.

C. Existing Codes of Ethics

Two widely recognized professional and organizational codes of ethics bear directly on TechFite’s conduct.

SHRM Code of Ethical and Professional Standards

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Code of Ethical and Professional Standards provides a detailed framework for how organizations should treat their workforce. The Code’s core commitments to fairness, dignity, equity, and transparency are not aspirational suggestions; they represent the professional standard by which HR-related decisions should be measured. TechFite’s reclassification strategy violates each of these commitments in sequence. Workers were not treated with dignity when their benefit packages were removed without adequate notice. They were not treated with equity when executives retained or expanded compensation at the same time. And they were not given transparency when the rationale for reclassification was obscured behind administrative language rather than honest communication about cost-cutting priorities.

Lebby and Terrell (2023) argue that SHRM’s framework functions most powerfully not as a compliance checklist but as a cultural signal: organizations that genuinely internalize its principles tend to build workforces characterized by loyalty, reduced turnover, and higher discretionary effort. By contrast, organizations that treat the Code as an external constraint to be managed tend to experience exactly the outcomes TechFite now faces, including disengagement, litigation risk, and reputational damage. TechFite’s conduct indicates an organization that either never internalized the SHRM standards or chose to set them aside when they became financially inconvenient.

Business Roundtable Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation (2019)

In 2019, the Business Roundtable issued a revised statement on corporate purpose, signed by nearly 200 chief executive officers, explicitly rejecting the shareholder-primacy model and committing signatory companies to responsibility toward all stakeholders, including employees, communities, and society at large. While TechFite may not be a signatory, this statement represents the direction of mainstream corporate governance thinking and provides a broadly accepted benchmark for what responsible corporate leadership looks like in the current era.

TechFite’s conduct is a direct illustration of what the Business Roundtable statement sought to move away from. Its decisions about employee reclassification and community investment were made by weighing short-term costs against shareholder and executive benefit, with minimal visible consideration of the harm to workers and community stakeholders. Malhotra and Hinings (2024) observe that organizations claiming stakeholder orientation while structuring decisions around shareholder primacy create a form of institutional hypocrisy that is particularly damaging to employee trust and community relationships, because the gap between stated values and observable actions is not invisible to the people it affects. TechFite’s stakeholders saw the gap clearly.

D. Corporate Social Responsibility Analysis

Carroll’s (1991) four-part CSR pyramid remains among the most durable and practically applicable frameworks for evaluating corporate social responsibility. It organizes a company’s obligations into four tiers: economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic. Each tier builds on the one below it, and a company cannot credibly claim to have fulfilled higher-level responsibilities while failing at lower ones. TechFite’s conduct, examined through this framework, reveals failures that span all four levels.

D1. Economic Responsibilities

Carroll’s base tier holds that a corporation must be profitable and generate sustainable economic value for its owners, employees, and the communities in which it operates. TechFite meets this requirement in the most minimal sense: it remains operational. However, the mechanism it chose to maintain profitability, namely stripping employee benefits to preserve margins and executive compensation, represents a distorted application of economic responsibility.

A financially healthy organization is not simply one that reports positive earnings; it is one whose economic performance does not systematically transfer costs onto its most vulnerable stakeholders. Baumgartner and Rauter (2021) argue that genuine economic responsibility requires integrating stakeholder welfare into the financial decision-making process rather than treating workforce costs as a discretionary variable to be adjusted whenever margins tighten.

TechFite’s economic decisions also carry indirect costs that the company appears not to have fully accounted for. The reclassification of full-time workers increases employee turnover, which generates training and recruitment costs. It reduces workforce engagement, which affects productivity and quality. And it creates legal exposure that carries both direct costs in litigation and indirect costs in management attention and reputational damage. A complete economic analysis would have shown that the savings from reclassification are substantially offset by these downstream consequences.

D2. Legal Responsibilities

Carroll’s second tier requires that organizations conduct their operations in compliance with applicable law. TechFite’s reclassification strategy raises significant concerns under both the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Affordable Care Act, each of which establishes thresholds for employment classification and associated benefit eligibility. If employees who regularly work full-time hours are administratively reclassified as part-time in order to bring them below these thresholds, TechFite may be engaged in misclassification, which carries federal and state legal liability.

Friedman and Belzer (2022) note that misclassification cases have become an increasingly significant area of employment law enforcement, partly because regulators have become more sophisticated at identifying the patterns that distinguish genuine part-time work arrangements from reclassification strategies designed to avoid benefit obligations. The fact that TechFite’s reclassification appears to have been systematic rather than case-by-case increases the legal risk considerably, since systematic patterns are more likely to attract regulatory attention and to support class-action claims. TechFite does not meet its legal responsibilities under Carroll’s framework.

D3. Ethical Responsibilities

Carroll’s third tier moves beyond legal compliance to require that organizations act in accordance with broader societal norms of fairness, honesty, and respect for stakeholders. TechFite’s conduct fails this standard on multiple dimensions. Workers were not informed in advance that their classification was under review. They were not given the opportunity to ask questions, seek alternative employment, or plan for the loss of benefits. This lack of transparency is not a minor procedural failing; it is a violation of the basic norm that people who depend on an organization for their economic security deserve honest treatment.

The simultaneity of executive bonus preservation and employee benefit elimination makes the ethical failure particularly stark. When an organization distributes sacrifice unevenly, shielding those with the most power while concentrating losses on those with the least, it violates the widely held norm of equitable treatment that Carroll’s ethical tier requires. Crane and Matten (2022) observe that ethical responsibility in Carroll’s framework is not satisfied by avoiding obvious wrongdoing; it requires actively ensuring that the organization’s decisions reflect a genuine commitment to fairness across all stakeholder groups. TechFite’s decisions reflect the opposite orientation.

D4. Philanthropic Responsibilities

Carroll’s fourth tier encompasses voluntary contributions to community welfare that go beyond legal and ethical minimums. TechFite did not merely aspire to meet this standard; it contractualized it. The public-private partnership with Dellburg included explicit, documented commitments to youth leadership programming and infrastructure investment. These were not vague expressions of goodwill; they were stated obligations that municipal planners and community organizations built their own plans around.

By failing to fulfill these commitments, TechFite transformed what should have been a philanthropic achievement into a breach of trust. Rivera et al. (2023) note that when corporations formalize philanthropic commitments to community partners, the nature of those commitments changes: they acquire a reliance interest on the part of the community, and failure to deliver produces harm that is both practical and relational. Dellburg lost funding it had already incorporated into plans, and it lost confidence in TechFite as a partner willing to honour its word. Restoring that confidence will require more than a financial payment; it will require a sustained demonstration of institutional accountability.

E. Recommendations

The following three recommendations are grounded in the ethical analysis above and designed to address the root causes of TechFite’s failures rather than their surface symptoms.

Recommendation 1: Restore Full-Time Classification and Benefits for Affected Employees

TechFite should conduct an immediate and comprehensive audit of all employees reclassified during the past two fiscal years and restore full-time employment status, along with accompanying benefits, to those who meet applicable hour thresholds under the FLSA and ACA. The audit should be conducted by an independent third party rather than by internal HR staff, given the institutional incentives that shaped the original reclassification decisions.

From a utilitarian standpoint, the aggregate welfare gained by restoring healthcare coverage, retirement contributions, and paid leave to dozens or hundreds of workers substantially outweighs the financial cost of reinstatement. From a legal standpoint, proactive remediation reduces TechFite’s exposure to wage-and-hour litigation. And from a cultural standpoint, the act of voluntary remediation, done transparently and with accountability for what went wrong, begins the process of rebuilding employee trust that the reclassification strategy destroyed. Colquitt and Zipay (2022) find that employees evaluate their organizations’ fairness not only through distributive outcomes but through procedural transparency, meaning that how TechFite handles this correction matters as much as the correction itself.

Recommendation 2: Fulfill Outstanding Community Investment Obligations Through a Structured Commitment Plan

TechFite should develop a documented and publicly communicated plan for fulfilling its outstanding obligations to the City of Dellburg. This plan should include a specific timeline for disbursing infrastructure funds, a schedule for resuming youth leadership sponsorships, and an accountability mechanism, such as quarterly progress reports to the city council, that makes the fulfilment process transparent to the community stakeholders who were harmed by the original failure.

Partial fulfilment within 90 days would serve as a credible signal of good faith. Under Carroll’s CSR framework, this recommendation addresses the philanthropic tier directly while simultaneously rehabilitating TechFite’s ethical standing by demonstrating that the company takes its stated obligations seriously. Rivera et al. (2023) argue that the restoration of community trust after a breach of formalized philanthropic commitment requires both financial delivery and visible institutional accountability. A plan that is documented, communicated, and subject to external monitoring satisfies both requirements.

Recommendation 3: Establish an Independent Ethics Oversight Committee

To prevent the recurrence of the decision-making failures that produced these ethical violations, TechFite should establish a standing ethics oversight committee with genuine authority. The committee should be composed of at least one independent board member, a senior HR representative, and a community liaison appointed by the City of Dellburg. It should be empowered to review major employment policy changes and significant partnership decisions before implementation, with the standing to delay or escalate decisions that raise ethical red flags.

The logic behind this recommendation is structural rather than motivational. The executives who made the decisions described in this analysis were not necessarily bad actors; they were acting within institutional structures that gave them both the incentive and the opportunity to prioritize short-term financial outcomes over stakeholder welfare. Changing those outcomes requires changing those structures.

Crane and Matten (2022) observe that ethics programs are most effective when they are embedded in governance structures rather than delegated to stand-alone compliance functions, because governance-level oversight changes the organizational context in which decisions are made rather than simply adding a review step after decisions have already been shaped by existing incentives.

References

Baumgartner, R. J., & Rauter, R. (2021). Strategic perspectives of corporate sustainability management to develop a sustainable organization. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140(3), 81–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.04.146

Carroll, A. B. (1991). The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders. Business Horizons, 34(4), 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(91)90005-G

Colquitt, J. A., & Zipay, K. P. (2022). Justice, fairness, and employee reactions. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behaviour, 9(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-090959

Crane, A., & Matten, D. (2022). Business ethics: Managing corporate citizenship and sustainability in the age of globalization (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Friedman, S., & Belzer, M. (2022). Worker misclassification and precarious employment: Legal and regulatory perspectives. Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 61(2), 183–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12299

Layton, M., & Verdery, A. (2022). Relational obligations and corporate philanthropy: When promises become responsibilities. Business Ethics Quarterly, 32(4), 541–568. https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2021.43

Lebby, G. M., & Terrell, J. P. (2023). Ethical HR practices and their organizational outcomes: A meta-analytic review. Human Resource Management Review, 33(2), Article 100949. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2022.100949

Malhotra, N., & Hinings, C. R. (2024). Institutional hypocrisy and stakeholder trust: Understanding the gap between espoused and enacted values in organizations. Organization Science, 35(1), 22–41. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1574

Rivera, J. L., Shaver, L. M., & Hicks, D. (2023). Community trust repair following corporate philanthropy failures: Evidence from public-private partnerships. Journal of Business Ethics, 184(3), 721–744. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05201-6

Scarre, G. (2023). Utilitarianism and contemporary ethics. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350346215

Society for Human Resource Management. (2022). SHRM code of ethical and professional standards in human resource management. https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/pages/code-of-ethics.aspx

U.S. Department of Labor. (2023). Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overview. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa

What Is WGU C717 Task 1?

WGU C717, titled Business Ethics, is a competency-based course that evaluates your ability to analyze ethical dilemmas, apply ethical frameworks, and assess organizational responsibility. Task 1 is the primary written performance assessment for this course and accounts for 100% of the grade in the task category.

Unlike traditional exams, Task 1 is a written case-based analysis. You are given a business scenario and asked to evaluate it through multiple ethical lenses, including stakeholder theory, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and at least one established ethical framework such as utilitarianism, deontology, or virtue ethics.

WGU C717 Task 1 Rubric Guide

The rubric is your blueprint. Every evaluator grades your submission section by section, and ‘Not Yet Competent’ on even one rubric criterion means a full revision. Understanding what evaluators want, not just what the prompt says, is the single most important skill you can develop before writing.

Section A: Organizational Overview

This section requires you to identify and describe the organization at the center of your ethical analysis. Evaluators look for specificity. Do not write a generic company description. You need to identify the company’s industry, its core stakeholders, and the ethical environment in which it operates.

Section B: Stakeholder Analysis

This is one of the most heavily weighted sections. You must identify all relevant stakeholders — internal and external — and analyze how the ethical issue impacts each group differently. This is not a list. This is a structured analysis that requires cause-and-effect reasoning.

• Identify primary vs. secondary stakeholders
• Analyze how each stakeholder is specifically affected
• Address both positive and negative impacts where applicable
• Use stakeholder theory language where appropriate

Section C: Ethical Theory Application

You must select and apply at least one ethical theory to analyze the organizational dilemma. The most commonly applied theories in C717 Task 1 papers are:

• Utilitarianism — greatest good for the greatest number
• Kantian Deontology — duty-based ethics, categorical imperative
• Virtue Ethics — character and moral virtues of decision-makers
• Rights-Based Ethics — individual rights as moral constraints
• Justice Theory — fairness and equitable distribution

Evaluators look for correct application, not just identification. Naming utilitarianism and then writing a paragraph that does not demonstrate utilitarian reasoning will result in ‘Not Yet Competent.’

Section D: CSR Analysis

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) analysis is the section where most students underperform. You must evaluate the organization’s responsibilities across Carroll’s four-part CSR pyramid or a similarly structured framework:

CSR Level	Description
Economic	The company’s responsibility to be profitable
Legal	The company’s responsibility to obey the law
Ethical	The company’s responsibility to do what is right beyond legal requirements
Philanthropic	The company’s responsibility to contribute to society voluntarily

Section E: Recommendations

Your recommendations must be specific, actionable, and tied directly to the ethical analysis you completed in earlier sections. Vague recommendations like ‘the company should improve its ethics policy’ are not competency-level responses.

• Reference the ethical framework you applied
• Tie recommendations to specific stakeholder needs
• Propose at least two to three distinct, concrete recommendations
• Explain how each recommendation addresses the identified ethical failure

How to Structure Your WGU C717 Task 1 Paper

WGU does not prescribe a rigid page count for Task 1, but most competent submissions fall between 7 and 12 pages, excluding references. Below is a rubric-aligned structure that organizing your paper for evaluator clarity.

Recommended Paper Structure

Section	Recommended Length
Introduction	1 paragraph
Organizational Overview (Section A)	1–2 pages
Stakeholder Analysis (Section B)	2–3 pages
Ethical Theory Application (Section C)	2–3 pages
CSR Analysis (Section D)	2–3 pages
Recommendations (Section E)	1–2 pages
Conclusion	1 paragraph
References	Minimum 5 peer-reviewed sources

Common Mistakes That Lead to Revisions

Understanding why students fail C717 Task 1 on the first attempt is just as valuable as understanding the rubric itself. Below are the most frequently cited revision reasons based on WGU evaluator patterns.

Mistake	What Evaluators Look for Instead
Summarizing the case instead of analyzing it	Critical analysis: cause, effect, ethical judgment
Naming an ethical theory without applying it	Explicit theory-to-situation application with reasoning
Listing stakeholders without analyzing impact	Differentiated, specific impact analysis for each group
Vague CSR commentary	Tier-by-tier CSR analysis tied to the specific dilemma
Generic recommendations	Specific, actionable recommendations linked to the ethical analysis
Thin source integration	Scholarly sources cited throughout to support every major claim
APA formatting errors	Correct APA 7 title page, citations, and reference list
Missing conclusion or weak close	Synthesis of analysis with forward-looking ethical takeaway

Frequently Asked Questions About WGU C717 Task 1

How long should WGU C717 Task 1 be?

There is no official minimum or maximum page count, but most competent submissions are between 7 and 12 pages of body content, not including the title page or references. Shorter papers rarely provide enough depth to achieve competency across all rubric sections.

How many sources do I need for C717 Task 1?

WGU does not specify a minimum source count for C717 Task 1, but most evaluators expect at least 5 to 7 peer-reviewed scholarly sources. These should be integrated throughout your analysis, not simply listed in a reference page. Sources should be recent, ideally published within the last five years.

What case should I use for the organizational analysis?

WGU typically allows students to select their own organizational case unless the assessment prompt specifies one. Choose a case with a clear, documented ethical dilemma that allows for stakeholder analysis and CSR evaluation. Well-known corporate ethics cases such as Enron, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson, or Patagonia’s supply chain practices provide rich material for analysis.

Can I use Carroll’s CSR pyramid for Section D?

Yes. Carroll’s four-part CSR pyramid is one of the most appropriate frameworks for the CSR section and aligns well with how WGU evaluators interpret the rubric. Ensure that you address all four tiers explicitly and connect them to your specific organizational case.

What happens if I receive a ‘Not Yet Competent’ on C717 Task 1?

You will receive detailed evaluator feedback specifying which rubric sections were marked ‘Not Yet Competent.’ You then revise and resubmit. There is no limit on resubmissions, but each revision cycle delays your course completion and can affect your pacing. Addressing all evaluator comments thoroughly before resubmitting is critical.

Is there a C717 Task 1 template I can follow?

WGU does not publish an official C717 Task 1 template. However, the rubric itself functions as a structural guide. Organizing your paper around the rubric sections with clearly labeled headings is the most effective approach for ensuring evaluators can locate and score each section of your submission.

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