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General Motors Recall Crisis Essay

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Introduction The beginning of the General Motors recall crisis was the alleged failure by the company to recall its faulty cars on time, despite having known about the ignition switch problem, which persisted over a decade. The aforementioned design flaw in over a million vehicles, which caused hundreds of fatalities, was well known by the company’s management, before the decision to recall the faulty vehicles. Ethical issues relate to the recall crisis concern GM’s favoring cover-up over legal considerations on customer safety. Concisely, the company concealed defects from the top management, dealers, and the public, while the car users crashed the cars and died from problems that General Motors could have fixed. This paper will focus on the issues surrounding the General Motors Recall Crisis. Discussion Social responsibility is important in a company’s operations with companies being expected to be responsible to the society in their operations. However, the culture at …show more content…

With the company’s code of conduct including right things as part of business conduct, the crisis has only revealed that the inactions of the company are against the ethics it purports to uphold. In business operations, whenever the top management fails in attaining unquestionable integrity and high level of business ethics, it becomes an insurmountable feat to anticipate responsible behavior. Furthermore, the absence of business integrity is the fundamental cause of the crisis that rocked General Motors. It is of utmost importance for the company to foster high levels of business ethics as part of its social responsibility and to ensure that quality of products and safety of users are among top priorities in its core priorities. Similar to other companies that have faced such a crisis, GM is learning the social responsibility lesson in the hard

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