Aida Castany
Catherine P. Slade
MGMT 3500
9/15/2014
The Case of American Express American Express is one of the companies that is thinking about to stop hiring employees who smoke. As the person in charge of this company I have to decide whether this should definitely be a rule in my company or it should not. However, I have been analyzing carefully this case and the key facts presented in the case that helped me determine my decision are that 6,000 companies refuse to hire smokers and that is a huge number to consider, another key fact is that a smoker costs about 4,000 more a year to employ because of increased health-care costs and lost productivity, I also considered that people that disagree about not hiring smokers think that this is a form of discrimination, but actually I would not define it with that term because an example of discrimination would be when a company does not give job to woman or black people. The last key fact that determined my decision was that it is so much cheaper not to hire smokers. The specific management concepts that I used to decide whether or not my company should hire an employee who smokes are the production deviance, the principle of utilitarian benefits, and the discretionary responsibility. The production deviance is one kind of workplace deviance that hurts the quality and quantity of work produced, in this case employees that smoke, take excessively long work breaks when they smoke and that would be an example of a production deviance. The principle of utilitarian benefits states that you should never take an action that does not result in greater good for society, in this case it is better for society if they do not smoke because it is unhealthy and many people die every year as a consequence of its consume. And the last concept, discretionary responsibility, pertains to the social roles that businesses play in society beyond
