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One student plays the role of Fred, a manager who makes frequent business trips by airplane

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One student plays the role of Fred, a manager who makes frequent business trips by airplane. Fred also likes to fly frequently on vacation, and appreciates accumulating frequent-flyer miles. Company policy allows employees to keep the frequent-flyer miles they accumulate for work. So Fred will often take indirect trips to a destination to accumulate more air miles. For example, to fly to San Francisco, he flew from Boston to Atlanta and then to San Francisco. In this instance, he could have made a shorter trip by flying directly from Boston to San Francisco, or from Boston to Chicago to San Francisco. In general, the longer, indirect flights are more expensive. Another person plays the role of Kelly, the office administrative assistant who sometimes helps Fred prepare his travel vouchers. Kelly, who has good knowledge of geography, notices this strange pattern of Fred taking indirect flights. She is also aware of company policy that permits employees to accumulate frequent flyer miles that are earned on business trips. Kelly is disturbed about what she perceives to be an inappropriate use of company resources and therefore an ethical violation. Kelly decides to discuss with Fred this most likely ethical violation. The role-play takes place in Fred’s cubicle, and you can imagine how defensive Fred is going to be. Run the role-play for about five minutes. For both scenarios, observers rate the role players on two dimensions, using a 1-to-5 scale from very poor (1) to very good (5). One dimension is “effective use of human relations techniques.” Observers look to see if Kelly can preserve her sense of ethics while not doing too much damage to her relationship with her boss, Fred. The second dimension is “acting ability.” A few observers might voluntarily provide feedback to the role players in terms of sharing their ratings and observations. The course instructor might also provide feedback.