Codes of Conduct Do Help Curb Dishonest Behavior
A new Working Paper from Harvard Business School has relevance for all of us, but should be required reading in the financial services industry. It sheds more light on when and why we engage in dishonest acts without feeling guilty, and concludes that codes of conduct do make a difference in curbing dishonest behavior, especially if they are signed and reinforced.
While the studies involved students, the experiments were relevant to the financial workplace in that they gave some students the opportunity to cheat by taking more money than they should and then to cover up their cheating by shredding documents.
A few excerpts:
Across four studies, we demonstrated that the decision to behave dishonestly changes levels of moral disengagement and that awareness of ethical standards affects the decision to engage in unethical behavior.
- …we find that once people behave dishonestly, they are able to morally disengage, setting off a downward spiral of future bad behavior and ever more lenient moral codes.
- …we also provide evidence that this slippery slope can be forestalled with simple measures, such as honor codes, that increase people’s awareness of ethical standards.
As a result, making morality salient not only reduces unethical behavior, but also makes individuals’ judgments more scrupulous.
- When bad behavior precedes moral questioning, people bend their moral beliefs to match the preceding action.
- When moral saliency precedes the temptation to act dishonestly, people adjust their actions to align with the established moral code.
*Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting
Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, Max H. Bazerman
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
