Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How we Can Fix It

C.  Moore; F.  Gino

Article | Research in Organizational Behavior | 2013

Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How we Can Fix It

by C. Moore and F. Gino

Abstract

This chapter is about the social nature of morality. Using the metaphor of the moral compass to describe individuals' inner sense of right and wrong, we offer a framework to help us understand social reasons why our moral compass can come under others' control, leading even good people to cross ethical boundaries. Departing from prior work focusing on the role of individuals' cognitive limitations in explaining unethical behavior, we focus on the socio-psychological processes that function as triggers of moral neglect, moral justification and immoral action, and their impact on moral behavior. In addition, our framework discusses organizational factors that exacerbate the detrimental effects of each trigger. We conclude by discussing implications and recommendations for organizational scholars to take a more integrative approach to developing and evaluating theory about unethical behavior.

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Moral Sensibility; Behavior;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Moore, C., and F. Gino. "Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How we Can Fix It." Research in Organizational Behavior 33 (2013): 53–77.

In six studies, we show that after experiencing a threat to their abilities, individuals who misrepresent their performance as better than it actually is boost their feelings of competence. We situate these findings in the literature on self-protection. We show that this “counterfeit competence” effect holds when threat is measured (Study 1), manipulated (Study 2), and when the opportunity to cheat is randomly assigned (Study 3). We extend our findings to a workplace context, showing that threatened individuals who lie on a job application feel more capable than those who report them honestly (Study 4). Finally, consistent with the argument that counterfeit competence is driven by self-protection, we find individuals do not predict they would experience such a boost (Study 5) and that cheating after threat offers benefits similar to those provided by other established methods of self-protection (Study 6). Together, our findings suggest that, after threat, misrepresenting one’s performance can function as a mechanism that helps to restore positive self-evaluations about one’s capabilities.

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Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How we Can Fix It

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