How One Person Can Change the Conscience of an Organization

Nicholas W. Eyrich, Robert E. Quinn, and
David P. Fessell
Harvard Business Review
Originally published 27 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

A single person with a clarity of conscience and a willingness to speak up can make a difference. Contributing to the greater good is a deep and fundamental human need. When a leader, even a mid-level or lower level leader, skillfully brings a voice and a vision, others will follow and surprising things can happen—even culture change on a large scale. While Yamada did not set out to change a culture, his actions were catalytic and galvanized the organization. As news of the new “not for profit” focus of Tres Cantos spread, many of GSK’s top scientists volunteered to work there. Yamada’s voice spoke for many others, offering a clear path and a vision for a more positive future for all.

The info is here.

Companies Are Judged More Harshly For Their Ethical Failures If The CEO Is A Woman

Emily Reynolds
British Psychological Society
Originally published 19 Nov 19

Gender inequality in the business world has been much discussed over the last few years, with a host of mentoring schemes, grants, business books and political activity all aimed at getting women into leadership positions.

But what happens when this goal is achieved? According to new research, unequal gender dynamics still prevail even at the very top. Nicole Votolato Montgomery and Amanda P. Cowen from the University of Virginia found that women CEOs are judged far more harshly than their male counterparts when a business fails ethically. However, when a failure is down to incompetence, they find, women receive less negative backlash.

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The team suggests that highlighting such traits in female leaders can “reduce the penalties for female-led organisations”. But others argue that women leaders shouldn’t give in to the pressure of adopting typically “male” traits, and that being helpful and community-focused are actually positive things to bring to the board room. Leaning into stereotypes may not be the best way, long-term, to break them — but either way, it’s clear there’s still a way to go for women in business.

The info is here.

Engineers need a required course in ethics

Kush Saxena

qz.com
Originally posted November 8, 2019

Here is an except:

Typically, engineers are trained to be laser-focused on solving problems in the most effective and efficient way. And those solutions often have ripple effects in society, and create externalities that must be carefully considered.

Given the pace with which we can deploy technology at scale, the decisions of just a few people can have deep and far-reaching impact.

But in spite of the fact that they build potentially society-altering technologies—such as artificial intelligence—engineers often have no training or exposure to ethics. Many don’t even consider it part of their remit.

But it is. In a world where a few lines of code can impact whether a woman lands a job in tech, or how a criminal is sentenced in court, everyone who touches technology must be qualified to make ethical decisions, however insignificant they may seem at the time.

Engineers need to understand that their work may be used in ways that they never intended and consider the broader impact it can have on the world.

How can tech leaders not only create strong ethical frameworks, but also ensure their employees act with “decency” and abide by the ideals and values they’ve set out? And how can leaders in business, government, and education better equip the tech workforce to consider the broader ethical implications of what they build?

The info is here.

Are We Causing Moral Injury to Our Physician Workforce?

Carolyn Meltzer
theneuroethicsblog.com
Originally posted November 5, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The term moral injury was coined by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, MD PhD, who, while working at a Veterans Affairs hospital, noted that moral injury is present when 1) there is a betrayal of what is considered morally correct, 2) by someone who holds legitimate authority (conceptualized by Shay as “leadership malpractice”), and 3) in a high-stakes situation (Shay and Monroe 1998). Nash and Little (2013) went on to propose a model that identified the types of war-zone events that contributed to moral injury as witnessing events that are morally wrong (or strongly contradicted one’s own moral code), acting in ways that violate moral values, or feeling betrayed by those who were once trusted. In a fascinating study using the Moral Injury Event Scale and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Sun and colleagues (2019) were able to discern a distinct pattern of altered functional neural connectivity in soldiers exposed to morally injurious events. In fact, functional connectivity between the left inferior parietal lobule and bilateral precuneus was positively related with the soldiers’ post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and negatively related with scores on the Moral Injury Event Scale.

Moral injury has been recently applied as a construct for physician burnout. Those who argue for this framework propose that structural and cultural factors have contributed to physician burden by undervaluing physicians and over-relying on financial metrics (such as relative value units, RVUs) as the primary surrogate of physician productivity (Nurok and Gewertz 2019). Turner (2019) recently compared the military experience to that of physician providers. While one may draw similarities between the front line of healthcare delivery and that experienced by soldiers, Turner argues that a fundamental tenet of military leadership - that leaders eat last – provides effective support for the health of the workforce. In increasingly large healthcare organizations managed by administrators who may be distant from the front line and reliant on metrics of productivity, the necessary sense of empathy and support from leadership can seem lacking.

The info is here.

A Theranos Whistleblower’s Mission to Make Tech Ethical

Brian Gallagher
ethicalsystems.org
Originally published September 12, 2019

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Is Theranos emblematic of a cultural trend or an anomaly of unethical behavior?

My initial impression was that Theranos was some very bizarre one-off scandal. But as I started to review thousands of startups, I realized that there is quite a lot of unethical behavior in tech. The stories may not be quite as grandiose or large-scale as Theranos’, but it was really common to see companies lie to investors, mislead customers, and create abusive work environments. Many founders lacked an understanding of how their products could have negative impacts on society. The frustration of seeing the same mistakes happen over and over again made it clear that something needed to be done about this.

How has your experience at Theranos helped shape your understanding of the link between ethics and culture?

If the company had effective and ethically mature leadership, the company may not have used underdeveloped technology on patients without their consent. If the board was constructed in a way to properly challenge the product, perhaps it would have been developed. If employees weren’t scared and disillusioned, perhaps constructive conversations about novel solutions could have arisen. On rare occasions are these scandals a sort of random surprise or the result of an unexpected disaster. They are often an accumulation of poor ethical decisions. Having a culture where, at every stakeholder level, people can speak-up and be properly considered when they see something wrong is crucial. It makes the difference in building ethical organizations and preventing large disastrous events from happening.

The info is here.

Evolutionary Thinking Can Help Companies Foster More Ethical Culture

Brian Gallagher
ethicalsystems.org
Originally published August 20, 2019


Here are two excerpts:

How might human beings be mismatched to the modern business environment?

Many problems of the modern workplace have not been viewed through a mismatch lens, so at this point these are still hypotheses. But let’s take the role of managers, for example. Humans have a strong aversion to dominance, which is a result of our egalitarian nature that served us well in the small-scale societies in which we evolved. One of the biggest causes of job dissatisfaction, people report, is the interaction with their line manager. Many people find this relationship extremely stressful, as it infringes on their sense of autonomy, to be dominated by someone who controls them and gives them orders. Or take the physical work environment that looks nothing like our ancestral environment—our ancestors were always outside, working as they socialized and getting plenty of physical exercise while they hunted and gathered in tight social groups. Now we are forced to spend much of our daytime in tall buildings with small offices surrounded by genetic strangers and no natural scenes to speak of.

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What can business leaders learn from evolutionary psychology about how to structure relationships between bosses and employees?

One of the most important lessons from our research is that leaders are effective to the extent that they enable their teams to be effective. This sounds obvious, but leadership is really about the team and the followers. Individuals gladly follow leaders who they respect because of their skills and competence, and they have a hard time, by contrast, following a leader who is dominant and threatening. Yet human nature is also such that if you give someone power, they will use it—there is a fundamental leader-follower conflict. To keep managers from following the easy route of threat and dominance, every healthy organization should have mechanisms in place to curtail their power. In small-scale societies, as the anthropological literature makes clear, leaders are kept in check because they can only exercise influence in their domain of expertise, nothing else. What’s more, there should be room to gossip about and ridicule leaders, and leaders should be regularly replaced in order to prevent them building up a power base. Why not have feedback sessions where employees can provide regular inputs in the assessment of their bosses? Why not include workers in hiring board members? Many public and private organizations in Europe are currently experimenting with these power-leveling mechanisms.

The info is here.

Allegations of sexual assault, cocaine use among SEAL teams prompt 'culture' review

Barbara Starr
CNN.com
Originally posted August 12, 2019

In the wake of several high-profile scandals, including allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use against Navy SEAL team members, the four-star general in charge of all US special operations has ordered a review of the culture and ethics of the elite units.

"Recent incidents have called our culture and ethics into question and threaten the trust placed in us," Gen. Richard Clarke, head of Special Operations Command, said in a memo to the entire force.
While the memo did not mention specific incidents, it comes after an entire SEAL platoon was recently sent home from Iraq following allegations of sexual assault and drinking alcohol during their down time -- which is against regulations.

Another recent case involved an internal Navy investigation that found members of SEAL Team 10 allegedly abused cocaine and other illicit substances while they were stationed in Virginia last year. The members were subsequently disciplined.

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"I don't know yet if we have a culture problem, I do know that we have a good order and discipline problem that must be addressed immediately," Green said.

In early July, a military court decided Navy SEAL team leader Eddie Gallagher, a one-time member of SEAL Team 7, would be demoted in rank and have his pay reduced for posing for a photo with a dead ISIS prisoner while he was serving in Iraq. Another SEAL was sentenced in June for his role in the 2017 death of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, a Green Beret, in Bamako, Mali.

The info is here.

Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse

Joshua Grubbs, Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, & Alicia James
PsyArXiv Preprints
Originally posted April 5, 2019

Abstract

Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the discourse occurs on social media. Several explanatory mechanisms for such conflict have been explored in recent psychological and social-science literatures. The present work sought to examine a potentially novel explanatory mechanism defined in philosophical literature: Moral Grandstanding. According to philosophical accounts, Moral Grandstanding is the use of moral talk to seek social status. For the present work, we conducted five studies, using two undergraduate samples (Study 1, N = 361; Study 2, N = 356); an sample matched to U.S. norms for age, gender, race, income, Census region (Study 3, N = 1,063); a YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Study 4, N = 2,000); and a brief, one-month longitudinal study of Mechanical Turk workers in the U.S. (Study 5 , Baseline N = 499, follow-up n = 296). Across studies, we found initial support for the validity of Moral Grandstanding as a construct. Specifically, moral grandstanding was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life.

Here is part of the Conclusion:

Public discourse regarding morally charged topics is prone to conflict and polarization, particularly on social media platforms that tend to facilitate ideological echo chambers. The present study introduces an interdisciplinary construct called Moral Grandstanding as possible a contributing factor to this phenomenon. MG links evolutionary psychology and moral philosophy to describe the use of public moral speech to enhance one’s status or image in the eyes of others. Specifically, MG is framed as an expression of status-seeking drives in the domain of public discourse. Self-reported motivations underlying grandstanding behaviors seem to be consistent with the construct of status-seeking more broadly, seeming to represent prestige and dominance striving, both of which were found to be associated with greater interpersonal conflict and polarization.

The research is here.

Social media giants no longer can avoid moral compass

Don Hepburn
thehill.com
Originally published April 1, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

There are genuine moral, legal and technical dilemmas in addressing the challenges raised by the ubiquitous nature of the not-so-new social media conglomerates. Why, then, are social media giants avoiding the moral compass, evading legal guidelines and ignoring technical solutions available to them? The answer is, their corporate culture refuses to be held accountable to the same standards the public has applied to all other global corporations for the past five decades.

A wholesale change of culture and leadership is required within the social media industry. The culture of “everything goes” because “we are the future” needs to be more than tweaked; it must come to an end. Like any large conglomerate, social media platforms cannot ignore the public’s demand that they act with some semblance of responsibility. Just like the early stages of the U.S. coal, oil and chemical industries, the social media industry is impacting not only our physical environment but the social good and public safety. No serious journalism organization would ever allow a stranger to write their own hate-filled stories (with photos) for their newspaper’s daily headline — that’s why there’s a position called editor-in-chief.

If social media giants insist they are open platforms, then anyone can purposefully exploit them for good or evil. But if social media platforms demonstrate no moral or ethical standards, they should be subject to some form of government regulation. We have regulatory environments where we see the need to protect the public good against the need for profit-driven enterprises; why should social media platforms be given preferential treatment?

The info is here.

Leader's group-norm violations elicit intentions to leave the group – If the group-norm is not affirmed

Lara Ditrich, AdrianLüders, Eva Jonas, & Kai Sassenberg
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Available online 2 April 2019

Abstract

Group members, even central ones like group leaders, do not always adhere to their group's norms and show norm-violating behavior instead. Observers of this kind of behavior have been shown to react negatively in such situations, and in extreme cases, may even leave their group. The current work set out to test how this reaction might be prevented. We assumed that group-norm affirmations can buffer leaving intentions in response to group-norm violations and tested three potential mechanisms underlying the buffering effect of group-norm affirmations. To this end, we conducted three experiments in which we manipulated group-norm violations and group-norm affirmations. In Study 1, we found group-norm affirmations to buffer leaving intentions after group-norm violations. However, we did not find support for the assumption that group-norm affirmations change how a behavior is evaluated or preserve group members' identification with their group. Thus, neither of these variables can explain the buffering effect of group-norm affirmations. Studies 2 & 3 revealed that group-norm affirmations instead reduce perceived effectiveness of the norm-violator, which in turn predicted lower leaving intentions. The present findings will be discussed based on previous research investigating the consequences of norm violations.

The research is here.

Mark Zuckerberg And The Tech World Still Do Not Understand Ethics

Derek Lidow
Forbes.com
Originally posted March 11, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Expectations for technology startups encourage expedient, not ethical, decision making. 

As people in the industry are fond of saying, the tech world moves at “lightspeed.” That includes the pace of innovation, the rise and fall of markets, the speed of customer adoption, the evolution of business models and the lifecycles of companies. Decisions must be made quickly and leaders too often choose the most expedient path regardless of whether it is safe, legal or ethical.

 This “move fast and break things” ethos is embodied in practices like working toward a minimum viable product (MVP), helping to establish a bias toward cutting corners. In addition, many founders look for CFOs who are “tech trained—that is, people accustomed to a world where time and money wait for no one—as opposed to a seasoned financial officer with good accounting chops and a moral compass.

The host of scandals at Zenefits, a cloud-based provider of employee-benefits software to small businesses and once one of the most promising of Silicon Valley startups, had their origins in the shortcuts the company took in order to meet unreasonably high expectations for growth. The founder apparently created software that helped employees cheat on California’s online broker license course. As the company expanded rapidly, it began hiring people with little experience in the highly regulated health insurance industry. As the company moved from small businesses to larger businesses, the strain on it software increased. Instead of developing appropriate software, the company hired more people to manually take up the slack where the existing software failed. When the founder was asked by an interviewer before the scandals why he was so intent on expanding so rapidly he replied, “Slowing down doesn’t feel like something I want to do.”

The info is here.

Will You Forgive Your Supervisor’s Wrongdoings? The Moral Licensing Effect of Ethical Leader Behaviors

Rong Wang and Darius K.-S. Chan
Front. Psychol., 05 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00484

Abstract

Moral licensing theory suggests that observers may liberate actors to behave in morally questionable ways due to the actors’ history of moral behaviors. Drawing on this view, a scenario experiment with a 2 (high vs. low ethical) × 2 (internal vs. external motivation) between-subject design (N = 455) was conducted in the current study. We examined whether prior ethical leader behaviors cause subordinates to license subsequent abusive supervision, as well as the moderating role of behavior motivation on such effects. The results showed that when supervisors demonstrated prior ethical behaviors, subordinates, as victims, liberated them to act in abusive ways. Specifically, subordinates showed high levels of tolerance and low levels of condemnation toward abusive supervision and seldom experienced emotional responses to supervisors’ abusive behaviors. Moreover, subordinates tended to attribute abusive supervision, viewed as a kind of mistreatment without an immediate intent to cause harm, to characteristics of the victims and of the organization rather than of the supervisors per se. When supervisors behaved morally out of internal rather than external motivations, the aforementioned licensing effects were stronger.

Here is a portion of the Discussion

The main findings of this research have some implications for organizational practice. Subordinates have a tendency to liberate leaders’ morally questionable behaviors after observing leaders’ prior ethical behaviors, which may tolerate and even encourage the existence of destructive leadership styles. First, organizations can take steps including training and interventions to strengthen ethical climate. Organizations’ ethical climate is not only helpful to manage the ethical behaviors within the organizations, but also has impact on shaping organizational members’ zero-tolerance attitude to leaders’ mistreatments and questionable behaviors (Bartels et al., 1998).

The Value Of Ethics And Trust In Business.. With Artificial Intelligence

Stephen Ibaraki
Forbes.com
Originally posted March 2, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Increasingly contributing positively to society and driving positive change are a growing discourse around the world and hitting all sectors and disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).

With more than $20 Trillion USD wealth transfer from baby boomers to millennials, and their focus on the environment and social impact, this trend will accelerate. Business is aware and and taking the lead in this movement of advancing the human condition in a responsible and ethical manner. Values-based leadership, diversity, inclusion, investment and long-term commitment are the multi-stakeholder commitments going forward.

“Over the last 12 years, we have repeatedly seen that those companies who focus on transparency and authenticity are rewarded with the trust of their employees, their customers and their investors. While negative headlines might grab attention, the companies who support the rule of law and operate with decency and fair play around the globe will always succeed in the long term,” explained Ethisphere CEO, Timothy Erblich. “Congratulations to all of the 2018 honorees.”

The info is here.

Business Ethics And Integrity: It Starts With The Tone At The Top

Betsy Atkins
Forbes.com
Originally posted 7, 2019

Here is the conclusion:

Transparency leads to empowerment:

Share your successes and your failures and look to everyone to help build a better company.  By including everyone, you create the illusive “we” that is the essence of company culture.  Transparency leads to a company culture that creates an outcome because the CEO creates a bigger purpose for the organization than just making money or reaching quarterly numbers.  Company culture guru Kenneth Kurtzman author of Common Purpose said it best when he said “CEOs need to know how to read their organizations’ emotional tone and need to engage behaviors that build trust including leading-by-listening, building bridges, showing compassion and caring, demonstrating their own commitment to the organization, and giving employees the authority to do their job while inspiring them to do their best work.”

There is no substitute for CEO leadership in creating a company culture of integrity.  A board that supports the CEO in building a company culture of integrity, transparency, and collaboration will be supporting a successful company.

The info is here.

Leaders matter morally: The role of ethical leadership in shaping employee moral cognition and misconduct.

Moore, C., Mayer, D. M., Chiang, F. F. T., Crossley, C., Karlesky, M. J., & Birtch, T. A. (2019). Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(1), 123-145.

Abstract

There has long been interest in how leaders influence the unethical behavior of those who they lead. However, research in this area has tended to focus on leaders’ direct influence over subordinate behavior, such as through role modeling or eliciting positive social exchange. We extend this research by examining how ethical leaders affect how employees construe morally problematic decisions, ultimately influencing their behavior. Across four studies, diverse in methods (lab and field) and national context (the United States and China), we find that ethical leadership decreases employees’ propensity to morally disengage, with ultimate effects on employees’ unethical decisions and deviant behavior. Further, employee moral identity moderates this mediated effect. However, the form of this moderation is not consistent. In Studies 2 and 4, we find that ethical leaders have the largest positive influence over individuals with a weak moral identity (providing a “saving grace”), whereas in Study 3, we find that ethical leaders have the largest positive influence over individuals with a strong moral identity (catalyzing a “virtuous synergy”). We use these findings to speculate about when ethical leaders might function as a “saving grace” versus a “virtuous synergy.” Together, our results suggest that employee misconduct stems from a complex interaction between employees, their leaders, and the context in which this relationship takes place, specifically via leaders’ influence over employees’ moral cognition.

Here is the Conclusion:

Our research points to one of the reasons why 'cleaning house' of morally compromised leaders after scandals may be less effective than we might expect. The fact that leadership affects the extent to which subordinates morally disengage means that their influence may be more profound and nefarious than one might conclude given earlier understandings of the mechanisms through which ethical leadership elicits its outcomes. One can eliminate perverse incentives and remove poor role models, but once a leader shifts how subordinates cognitively construe decisions with ethical import, their continuing influence on employee misconduct may be harder to undo.

The info is here.

Every Leader’s Guide to the Ethics of AI

Thomas H. Davenport and Vivek Katyal
MIT Sloan Management Review Blog
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

Leaders should ask themselves whether the AI applications they use treat all groups equally. Unfortunately, some AI applications, including machine learning algorithms, put certain groups at a disadvantage. This issue, called algorithmic bias, has been identified in diverse contexts, including judicial sentencing, credit scoring, education curriculum design, and hiring decisions. Even when the creators of an algorithm have not intended any bias or discrimination, they and their companies have an obligation to try to identify and prevent such problems and to correct them upon discovery.

Ad targeting in digital marketing, for example, uses machine learning to make many rapid decisions about what ad is shown to which consumer. Most companies don’t even know how the algorithms work, and the cost of an inappropriately targeted ad is typically only a few cents. However, some algorithms have been found to target high-paying job ads more to men, and others target ads for bail bondsmen to people with names more commonly held by African Americans. The ethical and reputational costs of biased ad-targeting algorithms, in such cases, can potentially be very high.

Of course, bias isn’t a new problem. Companies using traditional decision-making processes have made these judgment errors, and algorithms created by humans are sometimes biased as well. But AI applications, which can create and apply models much faster than traditional analytics, are more likely to exacerbate the issue. The problem becomes even more complex when black box AI approaches make interpreting or explaining the model’s logic difficult or impossible. While full transparency of models can help, leaders who consider their algorithms a competitive asset will quite likely resist sharing them.

The info is here.

Why It’s Easier to Make Decisions for Someone Else

Evan Polman
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted November 13, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

What we found was two-fold: Not only did participants choose differently when it was for themselves rather than for someone else, but the way they chose was different. When choosing for themselves, participants focused more on a granular level, zeroing in on the minutiae, something we described in our research as a cautious mindset. Employing a cautious mindset when making a choice means being more reserved, deliberate, and risk averse. Rather than exploring and collecting a plethora of options, the cautious mindset prefers to consider a few at a time on a deeper level, examining a cross-section of the larger whole.

But when it came to deciding for others, study participants looked more at the array of options and focused on their overall impression. They were bolder, operating from what we called an adventurous mindset. An adventurous mindset prioritizes novelty over a deeper dive into what those options actually consist of; the availability of numerous choices is more appealing than their viability. Simply put, they preferred and examined more information before making a choice, and as my previous research has shown, they recommended their choice to others with more gusto.

These findings align with my earlier work with Kyle Emich of University of Delaware on how people are more creative on behalf of others. When we are brainstorming ideas to other people’s problems, we’re inspired; we have a free flow of ideas to spread out on the table without judgment, second-guessing, or overthinking.

The info is here.

Life on the slippery Earth

Sebastian Purcell
aeon.co
Originally posted July 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

At its core, Aztec virtue ethics has three main elements. One is a conception of the good life as the ‘rooted’ or worthwhile life. Second is the idea of right action as the mean or middle way. Third and final is the belief that virtue is a quality that’s fostered socially.

When I speak about the Aztecs – the people dominant in large parts of central America prior to the 16th-century Spanish conquest – even professional philosophers are often surprised to learn that the Aztecs were a philosophical culture. They’re even more startled to hear that we have (many volumes of) their texts recorded in their native language, Nahuatl. While a few of the pre-colonial hieroglyphic-type books survived the Spanish bonfires, our main sources of knowledge derive from records made by Catholic priests, up to the early 17th century. Using the Latin alphabet, these texts record the statements of tlamatinime, the indigenous philosophers, on matters as diverse as bird-flight patterns, moral virtue, and the structure of the cosmos.

To explain the Aztec conception of the good life, it’s helpful to begin in the sixth volume of a book called the Florentine Codex, compiled by Father Bernardino of Sahagún. Most of the text contains edifying discourses called huehuetlatolli, the elders’ discourses. This particular section records the speeches following the appointment of a new king, when the noblemen appear to compete for the most eloquent articulation of what an ideal monarch should be and do. The result is a succession of speeches like those in Plato’s Symposium, wherein each member tries to produce the most moving expression of praise.

The info is here.

Building trust by tearing others down: When accusing others of unethical behavior engenders trust

Jessica A. Kennedy, Maurice E. Schweitzer.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume 149, November 2018, Pages 111-128

Abstract

We demonstrate that accusations harm trust in targets, but boost trust in the accuser when the accusation signals that the accuser has high integrity. Compared to individuals who did not accuse targets of engaging in unethical behavior, accusers engendered greater trust when observers perceived the accusation to be motivated by a desire to defend moral norms, rather than by a desire to advance ulterior motives. We also found that the accuser’s moral hypocrisy, the accusation's revealed veracity, and the target’s intentions when committing the unethical act moderate the trust benefits conferred to accusers. Taken together, we find that accusations have important interpersonal consequences.

Highlights

•    Accusing others of unethical behavior can engender greater trust in an accuser.
•    Accusations can elevate trust by boosting perceptions of accusers’ integrity.
•    Accusations fail to build trust when they are perceived to reflect ulterior motives.
•    Morally hypocritical accusers and false accusations fail to build trust.
•    Accusations harm trust in the target.

The research is here.

Moral leaders perform better, but what’s ‘moral’ is up for debate

Matthew Biddle
State University of New York - Buffalo - Pressor
Originally released October 22, 2018

New research from the University at Buffalo School of Management is clear: Leaders who value morality outperform their unethical peers, regardless of industry, company size or role. However, because we all define a “moral leader” differently, leaders who try to do good may face unexpected difficulties.

Led by Jim Lemoine, PhD, assistant professor of organization and human resources, the research team examined more than 300 books, essays and studies on moral leadership from 1970-2018. They discovered that leaders who prioritized morality had higher performing organizations with less turnover, and that their employees were more creative, proactive, engaged and satisfied.

A pre-press version of the study appeared online this month ahead of publication in the Academy of Management Annals in January 2019.

“Over and over again, our research found that followers perceived ethical leaders as more effective and trusted, and those leaders enjoyed greater personal well-being than managers with questionable morality,” Lemoine says. “The problem is, though, that when we talk about an ‘ethical business leader,’ we’re often not talking about the same person.”

The pressor is here.

The research is here.

Abstract
Moral forms of leadership such as ethical, authentic, and servant leadership have seen a surge of interest in the 21st century. The proliferation of morally-based leadership approaches has resulted in theoretical confusion and empirical overlap that mirror substantive concerns within the larger leadership domain. Our integrative review of this literature reveals connections with moral philosophy that provide a useful framework to better differentiate the specific moral content (i.e., deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism) that undergirds ethical, authentic, and servant leadership respectively. Taken together, this integrative review clarifies points of integration and differentiation among moral approaches to leadership and delineates avenues for future research that promise to build complementary rather than redundant knowledge regarding how moral approaches to leadership inform the broader leadership domain.