When you speak up to your boss, you are immediately risking your status and standing with your boss and potentially at your company. In Susan’s case, the concern is that Zantech could view the confrontation as her not following orders and being hard to work with, which could hurt Susan in the long run (as the internship is in a way an “extended interview”), or even worse, could result in Susan having her internship offer rescinded. This is particularly difficult as Susan doesn’t know the norms of the company well enough to gauge whether bringing the issue up would be well received.
However, if you accept the ethically dubious task and continue to follow orders, you are risking the reputation of the various entities you represent. Susan’s task puts the reputation and image of Zantech, her MBA program, and herself at risk in the scenario that someone finds out that Susan is misrepresenting herself. This is a risk that would be helpful to bring up as it affects all the relevant stakeholders and mitigating this risk could be mutually beneficial to Zantech—of course, whether to speak up in the first place is the first question to answer. Continuing to follow along could conflict with your morals and cause you to live out your career in cognitive dissonance at a company that doesn’t reflect your values. Susan was already feeling the uneasiness from this one task—any future questionable task would only compound this feeling.
