What’s Behind Unethical Behavior

Some people in their positions of authority and power can struggle with doing the “right” ethical thing because they do not manage and control their impulses. This occurs in different professions, even noble ones.

It can happen in a multitude of ways, overt and covert. Positional authority and power embolden deficiency of character and those with that weakness continue unprofessional ways because responsible oversight and corrective measures are insufficient or non existent.

This means these leaders can, with their dysfunctional strength, run roughshod over others. Safeguards are not in place to stop the behavior, and unimpeded, this can not surprisingly, transpire for years.

Communication Intelligence examines this problem with Sarah Cabral, a senior scholar in business ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and Ted Bililies, chief talent officer and managing director at AlixPartners, a management consulting firm.

Maybe a place to start the discussion is by asking about the roots and why are some professionals granted authority and power are vulnerable to behaving poorly.

“People in any profession and in any role face opportunities to act unethically. However, as one climbs the ladder, there are fewer people disagreeing with you and offering checks on your behavior,” Cabral says. “In general, people want to please authority figures, even if that means ignoring their own ethical standards and their supervisor’s bad behavior.”

There is a term for it, she adds.

“In part, this phenomenon is due to a cognitive bias called obedience to authority. Obedience to authority causes people to accept or even encourage the unethical behavior of their supervisors, which is why people granted authority and power are often more vulnerable to behaving poorly.”

There’s another thinking trap and error.

“The second relevant cognitive bias is the overconfidence bias,” Cabral states. “Often, individuals who have been successful in organizations and promoted to leadership positions develop overconfidence and downplay the role that others’ support or luck played in their rise to power. Irrational overconfidence prevents leaders from having a realistic view of their performance and moral judgment.”

She explains how this can play out.

“UNSW Business School senior lecturer Mark Humphery-Jenner’s research shows that overconfident CEOs are 25% more likely to be charged with securities fraud, since a CEO will make a falsely positive statement to investors and underestimate risks. This overconfidence can also delude leaders into thinking that they are acting ethically when they are not.”

Despite organizations best efforts in hiring and promoting professionals, there have to be some problems still occurring. One difficulty, asserts Bililies, is what he says is a shallow talent pool making for less choice.

“Hiring people is one of the most difficult challenges facing business leaders today. With an unemployment rate of 3.5%, many businesses are just trying to find people,” Bililies says. “According AlixPartners’ 2023 Disruption Index, 32% of CEOs report an inability to find enough employees with critical skills…”

It’s not just that though as he adds, “…in the majority of cases, companies do not know how or why to examine a person’s background and to make an assessment for fit, for ethics, for performance. There are multiple solutions possible, but these are not gaining acceptance as quickly as they should.”

It’s clear to Cabral where some of the problematic behavior is being granted access to an organization or being promoted within it.

“In many organizations, there is an ambiguity of priorities. While you can find core values or codes of conduct on most websites, what often gets prioritized in the organization is hard, measurable data when hiring and promoting,” she says.

“Often promotions are a result of taking on more responsibilities, exceeding sales targets or increasing donations rather than a reward for communicating with compassion, practicing humility or helping out your coworkers.

“Workplace bullies who get promoted usually have a high degree of social and political skill, such that they can charm those above them and manipulate coworkers to assist them in achieving measurable goals.”

An additional challenge, Cabral adds, is how exactly do organizations reliably measure for character or exercise due diligence in researching it.

“In regards to assessments, it is difficult to come up with a test for ethical behavior, because most tests can be gamed,” she says.

“Additionally, labor laws in some states allow employees to sue their former employers if they provide false or unsolicited information to prospective employers that prevent them from being hired. Questions about how an applicant ethically managed herself could potentially be avoided out of a desire to stick to obviously true or false statements.”

This reality makes improvements challenging yet certainly not impossible.

“While there are many deep and persistent motivations that can lead people to behave badly – greed, power, self-centered recognition immediately come to mind — the consequences of this behavior must be firmly established by a healthy organization,” Bililies says.

“What does this mean? It means that a superior or high perfuming organization has a clear set of values and principles on which it operates, and these values and principles are explicitly and implicitly reinforced and rewarded,” he says.

“We refer to this system of values and rewards as the culture of the organization. When an individual violates the culture of a healthy organization, there must be meaningful consequences.

“To the degree that there are not consequences, or there are exceptions made, the very integrity of the entire whole organization is at risk. In the age of social media, that kind of news travels like a wildfire and can affect talent attraction, recruitment, reputation and even share price.”

There exist tools and protective risk-management approaches, Bililies contends, that can provide insightful and practically useful.

“There are well-constructed surveys that based on normative groups that can identify when there might be a risk in judgment or behavior that are helpful. Thorough interviews, carefully done, are another effective method. Lastly, reference checks are frequently skipped or done incompletely (and) badly. These need to be increased in almost every case of an important hire.”

Natural human tendencies to be consistent with trust once developed is a variable — and risk — to be examined.

“The hope is that promoting from within would give a hiring committee a better viewpoint with which to judge the character of an applicant, but if an internal candidate has successfully won over a supervisor or board then questions regarding the character of an applicant may be obsolete,” Cabral says.

“Assessing a candidate for self-control is understandably more difficult to do when hiring from the outside. If the leader is the person who started the organization, then there was never a selection process.

“Regardless of how they got there, all leaders are susceptible to the effects of obedience to authority and overconfidence biases. Therefore, good governance will play a significant role in curbing reckless behavior and removing leaders when necessary,” she adds.

Boards can play a big role in self control, civility and respectful behavior. They can review contracts, consider how they are written and learn about the unseen points in them that don’t encourage ethical behavior in the pursuit of positional requirements and expectations.

“The board should consider how compensation packages can unintentionally promote overconfidence and unethical behavior,” Cabral notes. “Niagara University Professor Darren Treadway’s research suggests that employees ought to develop skills to overcome obedience to authority through training on how to manage bullies. There also needs to be accountability from below, and leaders should be anonymously evaluated by subordinates on self-control, civility and respect for others.”

In the end, she advises, it’s likely more beneficial to look at the macro instead of the micro components of ethics.

“Ultimately, organizations that want to promote ethical behavior at all levels of the organization, including leadership, ought to address ethics systematically rather than trying to change an individual’s behavior,” Cabral states.

“Nicholas Epley and David Tannenbaum’s Treating Ethics as a Design Problem recommends organizational policies that encourage ethical behavior, such as providing ethics checklists or questions for employees to ask prior to acting — and highlighting the exemplary ethical behavior in the workplace,” she says.

“Ann Skeet, senior director of Leadership Ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, offers a guide on how to manage an organization’s culture in a way that promotes ethical behavior. Utilizing the Markkula Center’s culture self-assessment tool provides a logical starting point for organizations.”