Managing Behaviour in Organisations paper 1000 words

Week 1: Introduction and Ethics

Managerial Psychology

Seminar Leader: Dr. Gamze Koseoglu [email protected]

Agenda

• Ethics • Ethics in organizations • Ethics in class and avoiding

plagiarism

Ethics

• Ethics refers to the systematic study of general principles of right and wrong behaviour.

• Morals and morality describe specific, culturally transmitted standards of right and wrong.

• Both ethics and morality involve decisions about right and wrong.

Johnson, (2007)

3 NOTE: Today’s presentation on ethics is based in large part on material prepared by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM; http://www.shrm.org)

Work is fraught with ethical dilemmas

• Restaurant owners need to choose between paying their staff award rates or going out of business.

• Hospital admissions staff need to decide whom to give a ventilator to • Salespeople need to choose between lying to a client to make a sale or

forfeiting their annual bonus • Managers need to accept firing a friend who is bad for the company but

losing the friendship in the process • A lab technician needs to decide between losing their job or blowing the

whistle on wrongdoing they witness and may have been complicit in.

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Ethics in Organizations: Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos

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Understanding Business Ethics

• What were some ethical/unethical behaviours in this case? How do you know that something was (un)ethical?

• Philosophical Approaches • Psychological Approaches

• How do people make the decision to act ethically or unethically in a given situation?

• What causes people to act ethically or unethically at work?

• What can and should organisations and managers do to encourage ethical and discourage unethical behaviour?

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Utilitarian Theory

• The action taken is ethical if it produces the most good and the least harm for everyone affected.

• Judgment is based on a cost/benefit analysis. – Some costs and benefits are difficult or impossible to measure.

• Focus is on the results of the action, not on how the results are achieved. – Assumes “the end justifies the means”.

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Jeremy Bentham

Deontology Theories

• Actions are intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of the consequences that mat follow from those actions.

• Actions cannot be justified by consequences: Ends do not justify means • “Do I want to live in a world that people perform an action or not?”.

Imagine a world everybody would act the way you want to act? – Everybody lies, or everybody cheats

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Immanuel Kant

Psychological Approaches

• Kohlberg’s Moral Development Theory • Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory

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Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

• Development in cognitive reasoning from lower order to higher order reasoning explains moral development

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Kohlberg, Lawrence; Charles Levine; Alexandra Hewer (1983). Moral stages : a current formulation and a response to critics. Basel, NY: Karger

Moral Foundations Theory

Harm & Fairness Ingroup & Authority Divinity

Individualising Binding

Graham, J.; Haidt, J.; Koleva, S.; Motyl, M.; Iyer, R.; Wojcik, S.; Ditto, P.H. (2013). Moral Foundations Theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism (PDF). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. 47. pp. 55–130.

Different people, different intuitions

Haidt (2007). The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology. Science.

How do we make make ethical decisions?

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Why are ethical decisions often so difficult? • Ambiguity

– Unclear or selectively applied rules and laws allows people to use self serving justifications and turn a blind eye.

• Anonymity – Lack of peer monitoring diffuses moral responsibility.

• Ethical Fading – Disparity between people’s abstract perception of their moral image

and their actual behavior allows them to do wrong but feel they are moral.

• Cognitive Depletion – Threatening experiences unleash self-protective impulses 14

What can and should organisations and managers do?

• Does punishment for wrongdoing work?

• The REVISE Model • Reminding • Visibility • Self-Engagement

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Ayal, S., Gino, F., Barkan, R., & Ariely, D. (2015). Three principles to REVISE people’s unethical behavior. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(6), 738-741.