How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

F.  Gino

Chapter | Cheating, Corruption, and Concealment | 2016

How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

Abstract

Cheating, fraud, deception, uncooperative actions, and many other forms of unethical behavior are among the greatest personal and societal challenges of our time. While the media commonly focuses on the most sensational scams (e.g., Enron, Bernard Madoff), less attention is given to more prevalent "ordinary" unethical behavior—unethical actions committed by people who value morality but behave unethically when faced with an opportunity to cheat. Ordinary unethical behavior causes considerable societal damage, as demonstrated by increasing empirical evidence. Drawing on recent research in moral psychology and behavioral ethics, I examine "moral flexibility," or the common ability to justify one's immoral actions by generating multiple and diverse rationales for why these actions are ethically appropriate. The chapter discusses various antecedents to moral flexibility that are likely to prompt ordinary people to do wrong while feeling moral and suggests future research directions regarding how self-serving justifications result in ethical misconduct.

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Organizations; Attitudes;

Format: Print

Citation:

Gino, F. "How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass." In Cheating, Corruption, and Concealment: The Roots of Dishonesty, edited by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Paul A.M. van Lange. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Article | Management Science | October 2020

Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process—task selection. Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision-making, we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload, individuals may choose to complete easier tasks in order to manage their load. We label this behavior task completion preference (TCP). Using six years of data from a hospital emergency department, we find that physicians engage in TCP, with implications for their performance. Specifically, TCP helps physicians manage variance in service times; however, while it initially appears to improve shift-level throughput volume, after adjusting for the complexity of the work completed, TCP is related to worse throughput. Moreover, we find that engaging in easier tasks, as compared to hard ones, is related to lower learning in service times. We then turn to the lab to replicate conceptually the short-term task selection effect under increased workload and show that it occurs due to both fatigue and the sense of progress individuals get from task completion. These findings provide another mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed.

Keywords: healthcare; knowledge work; discretion; Workload; Employees; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity;

Citation:

KC, Diwas S., Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino. "Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance." Management Science 66, no. 10 (October 2020). View Details

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How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

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