Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Blind Spots:
The Roots of
Unethical Behaviour
at Work
Acknowledging the perils of the want self and addressing the informal
values in an organization can lead to more ethical behaviour.
by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel
HOW ethical do you think you are, compared to the other people
reading this magazine? On a scale of 0 to 100, rate yourself relative
to them: if you believe you are amongst the most ethical in the
group, give yourself a score near 100; if you consider yourself average, give yourself a score of 50. Now rate your organization: on a scale of 0 to 100, how ethical is it compared to others?
If youre like most of the people we ve asked, both scores
will be higher than 50. If we averaged the scores of all the people
reading this, we guess the average would be about 75. Yet that
cant be the case: the average score would have .to be 50. Some
of you must be overestimating your ethicality. The fact is, most
This document is authorized for use by Jos Ignacio Torres Justinian, from 1/12/2016 to 4/7/2016, in the course:
NB4006: Liderazgo y Etica en la Gestion Publica - Pena (Spring 2016), Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM).
Any unauthorized use or reproduction of this document is strictly prohibited.
The notion that we experience gaps between who we believe ourselves to be and who we actually are is related to the problem of
bounded awareness. This term refers to the common tendency to
exclude relevant information from our decisions by placing arbitrary bounds around our denition of a problem, resulting in a systematic failure to see important information. To illustrate, take a
look at the following picture:
the gap that often exists between who we are and who we think
we should be.
While you might accept the fact that most people have inated perceptions of their own ethicality, in all likelihood you remain
skeptical that this applies to you. In fact, you are probably certain
that you are as ethical as you have always believed yourself to be.
Lets test this assumption. Imagine that you have volunteered to
participate in an experiment that requires you to try to solve a
number of puzzles. You are told that you will be paid according to
your performance a set amount for each successfully-solved puzzle. The experimenter mentions in passing that the research
program is well funded, and explains that, once you have nished
the task, you will check your answers against an answer sheet,
count the number of questions you answered correctly, put your
answer sheet through a shredder, report the number of questions
you solved correctly to the experimenter, and receive the money
that you reported you earned. Would you truthfully report the
number of puzzles you solved, or would you report a slightly higher number? Note that there is no way for the experimenter to
know if you cheated.
While we cant predict whether you would cheat on this task,
we do know that lots of seemingly nice people do cheat just a little. They count a problem that they would have answered correctly,
if only they hadnt made a careless mistake; or they count a problem
they would have aced if they only had another ten seconds. In addition, when piles of cash are present on a table in the room, people
are even more likely to cheat than when less money is visible. In this
case, participants presumably justify their cheating on the grounds
that the experimenters have money to burn. This study was not
the exception to the rule: ample research conrms that people who
believe they are honest do in fact cheat when given an easy, unveriable opportunity to do so.
Ethical Gaps in Organizations
Ethical gaps at the individual level are compounded when considered at the organizational level. One compelling example is the 1986
explosion of the Challenger space shuttle after it was launched at the
lowest temperature in its history. Extensive post-crash analyses documented that the explosion was caused because an O-ring on one of
the shuttles solid rocket boosters failed to seal at low temperatures.
On January 27, 1986, the night before the launch, engineers and
managers from NASA and from shuttle contractor Morton
Thiokol met to discuss whether it was safe to launch the
Challenger at a low temperature. In seven of the shuttle programs
24 previous launches, problems with O-rings had been detected.
Now, under intense time pressure, Morton Thiokol engineers hurriedly put together a presentation. They recommended to their
superiors and to NASA personnel that the shuttle should not be
launched at low temperatures, citing their judgment that there was
a connection between low temperature and the magnitude of these
past O-ring problems.
This document is authorized for use by Jos Ignacio Torres Justinian, from 1/12/2016 to 4/7/2016, in the course:
NB4006: Liderazgo y Etica en la Gestion Publica - Pena (Spring 2016), Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM).
Any unauthorized use or reproduction of this document is strictly prohibited.
This document is authorized for use by Jos Ignacio Torres Justinian, from 1/12/2016 to 4/7/2016, in the course:
NB4006: Liderazgo y Etica en la Gestion Publica - Pena (Spring 2016), Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM).
Any unauthorized use or reproduction of this document is strictly prohibited.
In The Ford Pinto Case, Douglas Birsch and John Fielder recount
that when it was discovered that the Pintos gas tank was unsafe,
nobody reported it to Lee Iacocca. Hell no, replied one Ford
engineer. That person would have been red. Whenever a problem
was raised that meant a delay on the Pinto, Lee would chomp on his
cigar, look out the window and say Read the product objectives and
get back to work. Iacocca was fond of saying, Safety doesnt sell.
Clearly, without a leader who believes in ethical decision making, an organization will not behave ethically. But at the same time,
having an ethical leader is not sufcient: ndings from the emerging eld of Behavioural Ethics suggest that the following less
obvious aspects of unethical behaviour must also be addressed.
Hidden-but-powerful informal values. The informal values
This document is authorized for use by Jos Ignacio Torres Justinian, from 1/12/2016 to 4/7/2016, in the course:
NB4006: Liderazgo y Etica en la Gestion Publica - Pena (Spring 2016), Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM).
Any unauthorized use or reproduction of this document is strictly prohibited.
This document is authorized for use by Jos Ignacio Torres Justinian, from 1/12/2016 to 4/7/2016, in the course:
NB4006: Liderazgo y Etica en la Gestion Publica - Pena (Spring 2016), Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM).
Any unauthorized use or reproduction of this document is strictly prohibited.