9. Pam is the executive director of the Wildtown Nature Center. The Nature Center started ten years ago with only one paid staff member, but as a result of grants and bequests, the Center has expanded its staff by leaps and bounds, and now has more than 30 paid staff and scores of volunteers. Her board has asked to draft a comprehensive personnel policy. Not thinking it is necessary to reinvent the wheel, she surfs the Internet and finds a document that serves as the personnel policy of a similar organization thousands of miles away. By simply changing the name of the organization and a few other cosmetic tweaks, she submits that personnel policy document as her own to the board.
a. Is Pam acting ethically by adopting this document as her own?
b. Is she acting ethically if she adopts this document as her own, but discloses to the board that the language came principally from a document she found on the Web?
c. Is she acting ethically if she first asks permission from the organization that originally formulated the personnel policy to use it for her own organization?