Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs

Ting  Zhang; Francesca  Gino; Max   Bazerman

Article | Research in Organizational Behavior | 2014

Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs

by Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman

Abstract

Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. Departing from prior work that focused mainly on examining the antecedents and consequences of dishonesty, we examine two approaches to mitigating unethical behavior: (1) values-oriented approaches that broadly appeal to individuals' preferences to be more moral, and (2) structure-oriented approaches that redesign specific incentives, tasks, and decisions to reduce temptations to cheat in the environment. This paper explores how these approaches can change behavior. We argue that integrating both approaches while avoiding incompatible strategies can mitigate the risk of adverse effects that arise from taking a single approach.

Keywords: corruption; dishonesty; Unethical Behavior; interventions; structure; values; Behavior; Ethics; Moral Sensibility;

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Citation:

Zhang, Ting, Francesca Gino, and Max Bazerman. "Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs." Research in Organizational Behavior 34 (2014): 63–79.

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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Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs

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