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.

Leaders’ perceived authenticity – the sense that a leader is acting in accordance with her “true self” – is associated with positive outcomes for both employees and organizations alike. How might a leader foster this impression? Using field and experimental data, we test whether sensitive self-disclosures – for example, revealing an aversion to public speaking – make leaders come across as authentic and lead to positive outcomes, such as an enhanced desire to work with that leader (Studies 1, 2A, 2B, and 3). Stemming from our conceptual account, we show that these benefits emerge when the self-disclosure is mild to moderately sensitive in nature (Study 4) and made voluntarily (as opposed to by requirement) (Study 6) by a relatively high-status person (Study 5). Would-be disclosers do not intuit these positive consequences of self-disclosure (Study 7), suggesting that leaders may under-employ an effective tool for making a positive impression.

Article | Management Science | December 2019

Communicating with Warmth in Distributive Negotiations Is Surprisingly Counterproductive

M. Jeong, J. Minson, M. Yeomans and F. Gino

When entering into a negotiation, individuals have the choice to enact a variety of communication styles. We test the differential impact of being “warm and friendly” versus “tough and firm” in a distributive negotiation, when first offers are held constant and concession patterns are tracked. We train a natural language processing algorithm to precisely quantify the difference between how people enact warm versus tough communication styles. We find that the two styles differ primarily in length and their expressions of politeness (Study 1). Negotiators with a tough communication style achieved better economic outcomes than negotiators with a warm communication style, both in a field experiment (Study 2) and in a laboratory experiment (Study 3). This was driven by the fact that offers delivered in tough language elicited more favorable counteroffers. We further find that the counterparts of warm versus tough negotiators did not report different levels of satisfaction or enjoyment of their interactions (Study 3). Finally, in Study 4 we document that individuals’ lay beliefs are in direct opposition to our findings: participants believe that authors of warmly worded negotiation offers will be better liked and will achieve better economic outcomes.

Keywords: Negotiation Style; Communication Strategy; Perception; Performance Effectiveness; Outcome or Result;

Citation:

Jeong, M., J. Minson, M. Yeomans, and F. Gino. "Communicating with Warmth in Distributive Negotiations Is Surprisingly Counterproductive." Management Science 65, no. 12 (December 2019): 5813–5837. View Details

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How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

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