Running Head: MORAL DISENGAGEMENT
Moral Disengagement and Unethical
Behavior at Work
Adam Barsky
Email: abarsky@unimelb.edu.au
Streams P, Q, and T
Moral Disengagement and Unethical Behavior at Work
A central thesis of in a segment of
the management literature on business ethics is that those committing corrupt
acts in organizations are often no more ill-intentioned than those who lead
saintly organizational lives. Indeed,
Colman (1987) stated that “almost all studies
have agreed on one point: White-collar offenders are psychologically ‘normal’”
(p. 178). Therefore, this dissertation focuses
away from the problem of identifying and weeding out the “immoral” people who
are engaging in organizational wrongdoing by operating under the assumption
that most people who do wrong are not inherently bad (e.g., Bersoff,
1998). Instead, unethical behavior may often be the result of breakdowns in
individuals’ moral reasoning.
Over the previous two decades, a number of frameworks have been proposed
as models for understanding the reasoning or decision-making processes
underlying moral (or immoral) behavior (e.g., Rest, 1986; Trevino, 1986).
Jones’s (1991) issue-contingent model is often cited as a comprehensive
synthesis model of ethical decision-making (e.g., Street,
The foundation of Jones’s
(1991) model lies in Rest’s (1986) multi-stage model, whereby individuals are
argued to move through a series of sequentially ordered steps during the course
of making a decision to act ethically or unethically (e.g., Jones, 1991). In
the first step, the terms “ethical recognition” and “moral awareness” are often
used interchangeably in reference to individuals’ recognition that their
decision or action will harm or help others, and that they have some volition
in acting or making a decision. Once a problem is recognized as moral,
decision-makers enter the second step wherein they reason that acting morally
is warranted and, therefore, resolve to place moral concerns above other
concerns. This process is referred to as establishing moral or ethical intent. The
steps (i.e., ethical recognition, ethical judgment, and ethical intent) in
ethical decision-making scenarios act as a script, which, when activated,
ultimately increase the probability of ethical behavior. In addition, this
decision-making script functions such that the activation of a prior step
usually precedes the activation of future steps.
Moral Disengagement and
the Use of Rationalizations
As suggested above, this manuscript
presupposes that most wrongdoers in organizations are psychologically “normal,”
in the sense that they see themselves as fair, moral, and honest (Allison, Messick, & Goethals, 1989).
Given that individuals typically imagine themselves as moral people, one would
expect that, if a moral issue were recognized, then individuals would always
attempt to act ethically to maintain a consonant self-image. However, this
reaction is often not the case, as ethical recognition is often a necessary but
insufficient condition for ethical behavior. A further process is also
required, whereby individuals judge their behavior as acceptable and form an
intention to behave in a given way (e.g., Bersoff,
2001). This paper will describe a process referred to as moral disengagement,
whereby individuals justify or rationalize their behavior to disengage social
or personal sanctions against acting unethically. Thus, the more employees
morally disengage, the more likely they will be to engage in unethical
behavior. While the concept of rationalizations has
In attempting to explain
deviant behavior among juvenile delinquents, Sykes and Matza
(1957) asserted that most delinquents possess conventional values and are able
to commit delinquent acts by subscribing to certain rationalizations that define
such acts as situationally appropriate. Similarly, Bandura (1999) suggested, “the self-regulatory mechanisms
governing moral conduct do not come into play unless they are activated, and
that there are many psychosocial maneuvers by which moral self-sanctions are
selectively disengaged from inhumane conduct” (p. 193). In other words, moral
disengagement is predicated on the use of “psychological maneuvers,” which are
consistent with the rationalizations described by Sykes and Matza
(1957). Below, I will briefly discuss two rationalizations (i.e., moral justification and displacement of responsibility), and
review evidence suggesting that rationalizations disrupt moral behavior by
providing justification to morally disengage, and therefore, to act in an unethical
manner. Although people may use a variety of rationalizations
(see Ashforth
& Anand, 2004 for a review),
moral justification and displacement of responsibility are focused on here as both
have been widely researched and have
the clearest
links to goal-setting.
Moral justification. Rationalizations
facilitate moral disengagement by articulating reasons why the specific
unethical acts are justifiable or excusable exceptions to the general normative
rules (e.g., Ashforth & Anand,
2004). The first rationalization, moral
justification, involves cognitive reconstruction of the behavior itself.
That is, people often do not intend to engage in unethical
behavior until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions
(e.g., Bandura, 1999). In
this process, unethical behavior is made personally and socially acceptable by
portraying it in the service of valued or moral purposes. This concept is
similar to Sykes and Matza’s (1957) idea that people
neutralize their wrongdoing by appealing to higher loyalties. That is, people
construe that ethical norms have to be sacrificed for more important causes.
Experimentally, Bandura et al. (1996) found that
“moral reconstrual of harmful conduct by linking it
to worthy purposes” (p. 364) was the most powerful predictor of detrimental
activities (e.g., violence, lying).
Hypothesis 1: Moral disengagement through moral justification
is positively related to engagement in unethical behavior.
Displacement of responsibility. A second commonly
identified rationalization is the displacement of responsibility (e.g., Ashforth & Anand, 2004).
Researchers argue that people are most likely to form ethical intentions when
they acknowledge that they have an agentive role in the ethical behavior to
which they engage (e.g., Bandura, 1999).
Thus, people may disengage their moral controls if they deny responsibility of
their actions due to circumstances beyond their control. The circumstances may
include such things as management orders, peer pressure, dire financial
straits, existing precedent, that everyone else is doing it, that they play a
small part, and so on (e.g., Greenberg, 1998). For example, employees of
Beech-Nut, a company that sold a purely chemical cocktail advertised as baby
formula to the public, reported that other companies were doing the same thing,
and that their company was just following the pack (Welles,
1988). In essence, Beech-Nut employees denied their own culpability in the
decision by suggesting that it was due to forces beyond their control.
Empirical studies have demonstrated that, in fact, displacement of
responsibility can interfere with individual’s intention to act ethically.
For instance, in a laboratory study, Bersoff
(2001) found that people were likely to take an “accidental” overpayment by an experimenter,
unless the displacement of responsibility neutralization was made unavailable.
This neutralization was made unavailable by asking subjects
explicitly if they had received correct payment.
In sum, the above review
suggests that ethical recognition and engagement of moral controls are critical
decision-making factors related to ethical behavior. That
is, I presented theoretical and empirical evidence that individuals who don’t
recognize the morality of an issue are unlikely to engage in any form of moral
reasoning, thus increasing the likelihood that unethical behavior will be
elicited. In addition, evidence was provided that moral disengagement through
the use of rationalizations, such as linking harmful or deceitful behavior to
moral causes, are effective in neutralizing peoples moral self-sanctions to act
ethically, thereby releasing the individual to act in a corrupt manner.
Consistently, I propose the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2: Moral disengagement though displacement of
responsibility is positively related to engagement in unethical behavior.
Thus far, I have
reviewed theory and research suggesting that ethical behavior is the result of decision-making
processes that involves and not
rationalizing away the need to act morally. Next, I will describe a managerial simulation
study designed to test the previous hypotheses.
Method
Participants
One hundred and sixty-four
undergraduates were recruited from business (N=65) and psychology classes
(N=99) at a private,
Stimulus Material
Participants were asked to
play the role of “Pat Mason,” the National Sales Manager of Micrometer
Electronics Inc., an electronics components manufacturing firm. First,
participants were given background information in order to facilitate their
role-playing exercise. Next, participants were presented with the first of
three sections. The first section of the in-basket contained 16 items, including
an organization chart, a company newsletter, and 14 letters, memos, or phone
messages. One of the items (placed 4th among the items) was designed
to provide the goal-setting manipulation. The other 13 letters, memos, and
phone messages presented the decisions to be made. Two of these decisions
(placed 14th and 16th among the items) were ethical in
nature. The other 11 decisions were included to mask the ethics focus of the
study. Subjects were given 45 minutes to read through the in-basket and make decisions
using a response form to record decisions after each message.
Unethical Behavior. Unethical behavior was measured
through two decision opportunities. The first decision was taken directly from
the in-basket developed by Trevino and Youngblood (1990). In the first ethical
decision opportunity, the parts decision,
subjects responded to a memo from William Wyley,
Vice-President of Production, in which he stated that he had decided to change
the material used in a particular product component to save on production
costs. He advised that customers should not be informed despite potential
problems. Mason was informed that sales revenues would likely suffer a $500,000
loss if customers were informed of the change. Participants decided what to do,
if anything, in response.
The second ethical
decision situation was adapted from an in-basket developed by Brief et al.
(1996). Mason was asked to decide whether or not he/she wished to recognize the
impending sales of a wiring system on this quarter’s financial statement even
though the sale had not been completed.
For each decision,
participants were provided a response form that listed a number of options and
instructed to choose one. The available options were coded a priori as ethical
or unethical (an equivalent number of each) on the basis of criteria developed
by Trevino and Youngblood (1991). In the parts situation, a decision not to
inform customers was coded as unethical. In the financial reporting decision,
participants could choose either to record the $750,000 gain on the current
quarter, or wait for the sale to be completed before reporting the gain. A
decision to record the gain in the current quarter was unethical because it
entailed dishonestly reporting the company’s current financial situation (i.e.,
recording the sale of a wiring system before the sale actually occurred). Thus,
each participant received a score of 0, 1, or 2, indicating the number of
unethical decisions made.
Moral
Disengagement. Using a priori theoretical
categories of rationalizations, Bandura et al. (1996)
developed a moral disengagement scale that measured the propensity to use
rationalizations for violence and delinquency among schoolchildren. Items in
the original measure tapped eight mechanisms (e.g., rationalizations) of moral
disengagement: (a) readiness to construe injurious conduct as serving righteous
purposes, (b) rendering harmful activities benign by advantageous comparison,
(c) using morally neutral language to describe harmful activities, (d)
disowning responsibility for harmful effects by displacement or (e) diffusion
of responsibility, (f) minimizing the harmful effects of one's detrimental
conduct, (g) devaluing those who are maltreated, and (h) attributing blame to
them (e.g., Bandura, 1999; Bandura et al., 1996). To cite some examples, “If
people are careless where they leave things it is their own fault if they get
stolen” was one of the items measuring attribution of blame to the victims. The
item “Kids cannot be blamed for misbehaving if their friends pressured them to
do it” measured displacement of responsibility. “Some people deserve to be
treated like animals” measured proclivity for dehumanization (Bandura et al., 1999).
For the purposes of the
current study, a modified version of the moral-disengagement scale was created.
The current scale includes items exclusively pertaining to the rationalizations
discussed in the introduction (i.e., moral justifications and displacement or
diffusion of responsibility). In addition, the detrimental activities and
social context embedded in each item were modified to be relevant for working
adults and to refer to activities in which the individual could have engaged
during the course of the in-basket. That is, while the original items referred
to detrimental activities such as physically injurious conduct, verbal abuse,
deception, and theft, the current items refer specifically to deception.
Similarly, the social context in the original scale was modified from referring
to educational, familial, community, and peer relations to refer to
organizational and supervisory relations. For example, an original moral
justification item stated “It is alright to fight to protect your friends,” and
the modified item read: “It is alright to stretch the truth to protect your
company.” An original displacement of
responsibility item stated “Kids cannot be blamed for misbehaving if their
friends pressured them to do it,” and was modified to state “Employees cannot
be blamed for wrongdoing if they feel that their boss pressured them to do it.”
The moral disengagement
scale (see Appendix A) consisted of 13 items rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly
Agree) indicating the degree to which participants had the following thoughts
while in the role of Pat Mason. As discussed above, moral disengagement was
conceptualized to be a construct composed of rationalizations that allow an
individual to disengage their internal moral controls by (a) justifying
unethical behavior in moral terms (i.e., moral justification) and (b)
displacing responsibility for the behavior to an external agent (i.e.,
displacement of responsibility).
To assess factor
structure, a principle axis factor analysis with varimax
rotation was conducted on the data. The first step in a factor analysis, once
the initial eigenvalues are extracted, is to
determine which factors should be retained for rotation. Selecting the correct number of factors to
retain requires setting criteria for retention based on the eigenvalues
generated in the exploratory factor analysis.
The approach used to select factors for rotation was parallel analysis,
which estimates what eigenvalues one would expect by
chance alone given a specified number of items and participants (see Kaufman
& Dunlap, 2000). Some researchers
have argued that parallel analysis offers a more practical solution than
Kaiser’s rule, as the number of items in a given scale influences the
likelihood that an eigenvalue will exceed 1 (Bacon,
2001). The parallel analysis indicated that, given 13 items and 164
participants, the first factor should have an eigenvalue
over 1.50, and the second factor should have an eigenvalue
over 1.37, and the third factor should have an eigenvalue
over 1.27. Given this criteria, the
factor analysis extracted and rotated two factors with eigenvalues
of 4.06 and 1.67 respectively. In
addition to the parallel analysis, the scree plot was
visually inspected to determine if a third factor was present. Indeed, the remaining 11 factors that were
extracted appeared to form a relatively discontinuous group (i.e., scree) from the first two factors. The rotated factor
loadings are reproduced in Table 1, and show a pattern of loadings largely
consistent with the original theoretical rational for the dimensions of moral
disengagement. For instance, the four
items (i.e., items 1, 8, 10, & 14) written to reflect moral justification
(e.g., “It is alright to exaggerate the truth to keep your company out of
trouble,” item 14) loaded on a single factor with high internal consistency (alpha
= .82). In addition, the items written to reflect displacement of
responsibility (e.g., “Employees are not at fault for wrongdoing if their boss
puts too much pressure on them to perform at work,” item 18) loaded on a second
factor, with the exception of items 2, 7, and 16 which did not load on either
factor. Two items (items 11 and 13) displayed cross-loadings on the first
factor; however, the cross-loadings were substantially lower than the loading
on the second factor. Therefore, a six
item scale measuring displacement of responsibility was created using items 4,
5, 11, 13, 15, and 18, which had an internal consistency estimate of .71.
Results
Descriptive statistics and
intercorrelations are presented in Table 2. As
predicted, both moral disengagement through moral justification and
displacement of responsibility were significantly related to unethical
behavior. However, the magnitude of the relationships was quite different, with
moral justification strongly related (r = .34, p < .01) and displacement of
responsibility only weakly related (r = .15, p < .05) to unethical
behavior. When both variables were
simultaneously entered into a regression equation predicting unethical
behavior, the effect of moral justification on unethical behavior changed very
little (β = .33, t = 4.12, p <.01), while the effect of displacement of
responsibility dropped to near zero (β = .01, t = .12, ns). Thus, the sub-dimensions do not explain
independent variance, as moral justification appears to account for virtually all
of the variability in unethical behavior.
The significance of this finding will be returned to as a discussion
point in the following section.
Discussion
Consistent with previous theorizing on the subject (e.g., Bandura, 1999; Jones, 1991), moral disengagement was
significantly related to individuals’ propensity to make unethical decisions.
At first brush, this result is not particularly groundbreaking. However, moral
disengagement through the use of rationalizations is implicitly (e.g., Rest,
1987) or explicitly (e.g., Bandura et al., 1996;
Sykes & Matza, 1957) central to most model of
ethical decision-making, organizational researchers have yet to examine the
construct empirically. Therefore, this paper may provide some important
findings regarding the nature of moral disengagement in organizational
behavior. First, the factor structure of
the moral disengagement scale corresponded to the theoretical dimensions
specified in the original scale developed by Bandura
et al. (1996). That is, items tapping moral justification, or rationalizations
that reconstrue misbehavior as moral, tended to
cluster together, and items related to displacement of responsibility tended to
cluster together. First, I suggested
that moral disengagement may represent a unitary construct, with moral
justification and displacement of responsibility as alternate mechanisms
through which this may take place.
However, given the results of Study 1, treating moral disengagement as a
general factor does not appear to be appropriate. Instead, moral disengagement though moral
justification and moral disengagement though displacement of responsibility,
appear to operate differently, and should be assessed independently.
In terms of theoretical value within the current dissertation, moral
disengagement through reconstruing detrimental
conduct as servicing valued social or moral purposes (i.e., moral
justification) appears to be the sole predictor of unethical behavior. That is, once moral justification is
accounted for, moral disengagement through displacing the responsibility of
ones actions to an external agent does not appear to predict unethical
behavior. This finding suggests that disengaging of the moral controls that
stop individuals from behaving unethically has more to do with how individuals
construe their behavior, than who they rationalize as being ultimately
responsible for their behavior. This is,
consistent with studies suggesting that individuals seek to appear “moral”
(Batson et al., 1999), justifying the morality of a harmful or deceitful act
seems to be substantially more important, in terms of releasing an individual
to engage in the behavior, than simply appearing “not responsible.”
The results regarding the mechanisms moral disengagement are
provocative for future research, both as in terms of conceptualizing the
variables and understanding how disengaging one’s moral controls may influence
one’s propensity to act unethically. In
Given that organizational researchers have shown that providing justifications
for wrongdoing can influence other types of organizationally undesirable
behaviors such as discriminatory behaviors (e.g., Brief et al., 2000),
establishing a connection between rationalizations for moral disengagement and
unethical conduct is a reasonable next step. The availability of
rationalizations may be amenable to change, thereby providing an avenue for
combating unethical behavior at work.
For example, moral justifications such as “If an employee needs to stretch the truth to do their job, they cannot
be blamed for lying” (item 8)
could be countered by executives who emphasize the priority of honest business
dealing over increasing revenue.
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Table 1
Factor loadings for Moral Disengagement Scale
|
Item |
F1 |
F2 |
|
Moral
Justification |
|
|
|
14. It is alright to exaggerate the truth to keep
your company out of trouble. |
.80 |
|
|
10. If it helps you do your job, it is
alright to deceive clients or customers. |
.75 |
|
|
1. It is alright to stretch the truth to
protect your company. |
.74 |
|
|
8. If an employee needs to stretch the
truth to do their job, they cannot be blamed for lying. |
.71 |
|
|
Displacement of Responsibility |
|
|
|
18. Employees are not at
fault for wrongdoing if their boss puts too much pressure on them to perform
at work. |
|
.69 |
|
4. Employees cannot be
blamed for wrongdoing if they feel that their boss pressured them to do it. |
|
.64 |
|
11. If an employee perceives that his/her
company wants him/her to do something unethical, it is unfair to blame the
employee for doing it. |
.31 |
.51 |
|
13. Employees cannot be blamed for
exaggerating the truth when all other employees do it. |
.34 |
.50 |
|
15. It is unfair to blame an employee who
had only a small part in the harm caused by a company’s actions. |
|
.45 |
|
5. If employees engage in
unethical behavior at work, it is their boss’s fault. |
|
.32 |
|
16. If employees are not going to be
disciplined, they should not be blamed for wrongdoing. |
|
|
|
7. An employee who only suggests breaking
rules should not be blamed if other employees go ahead and do it. |
|
|
|
2. An employee should not be blamed for the
wrongdoing done on behalf of the organization |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Initial Eigenvalue
Estimate |
4.04 |
1.67 |
|
% of Variance Accounted For |
31.09 |
12.87 |
Note: N = 164. Factor
loadings less than |.30| are not shown.
Table 3
Means, Standard Deviations and Intercorrelations
of Variables Used in Study 1
|
Variable |
Mean |
SD |
1 |
2 |
3 |
|
Using all
participants |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1. Unethical Behavior |
0.62 |
0.69 |
- |
|
|
|
6. Moral Justification |
2.74 |
1.17 |
.34** |
(.82) |
|
|
7. Displacement of
Responsibility |
2.92 |
.93 |
.15* |
.44** |
(.71) |
Note. N= 164 for all
correlations. Reliabilities are in parentheses on the diagonal.
* p < .05; ** p < .01