Organizational Ethics Gone Wrong

Organizational Ethics Gone Wrong by Jonathan Bailey and Ted Thomas at” Leonard Francis, owner of Glenn Defense Marine Asia and a good friend to the Navy leadership for over a decade, defrauded the U.S. Navy for $35 million dollars. The investigation that followed implicated scores of Navy personnel, including admirals, in the Fcorruption scandal. He bribed leaders and key personnel with money, prostitutes, expensive gifts, free vacations, and other things. In return for his “gifts,” he gained classified information about docking schedules and overcharged the Navy for his company’s services.1 The remarkable fact about all of this is not that it happened, but that the corruption was so rampant and almost became part of the accepted culture of the 7th fleet. With all of the fiscal oversight within government contracting and the organizational moral codes of the armed services, how could this happen? How could this many organizational leaders move from their ethical foundations and drift into unethical behavior, or even condone it by their inaction as they watched others participate in it? What causes an organization to drift from its espoused values to immoral and often criminal behaviors, and how can leaders prevent this from happening? The answers to these questions are important for organizational leaders to understand, and the answers carry significant moral and ethical implications for society.2 High profile leaders who fall from grace due to abuse of power, money, or sex issues get a lot of press—bad press. In many cases, others in the organization knew the leader was doing something Chaplain (Major) Jonathan Bailey is the Ethics Instructor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School. His civilian education includes a Bachelor of Arts in history and religious studies from Stetson University, as well as a Master of Divinity and a Master of Sacred Theology in Ethics from Boston University School of Theology. He has served as a chaplain in the U.S. Army for 13 years. Ted Thomas, Ph.D., Lieutenant Colonel, retired, is formerly the Director of the Department of Command and Leadership in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, retiring at the close of academic year 2019. Thomas graduated from the United States Military Academy and served in various command and staff positions before retiring from the military. He received a master’s from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. from Missouri University of Science and Technology. Arthur D. Simons Center for Interagency Cooperation, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas FEATURES | 71 unethical, but did nothing about it. This might be depression, rampant inflation, joblessness, and due to fear of losing their job or out of a sense other social difficulties from the peace treaty of loyalty and respect for their leader. Another imposed on Germany, would the bad apple problem appears when widespread immoral, of Adolph Hitler have ever been produced?4 illegal, or unethical behavior becomes part of an The proverbial question of which came first, organization’s culture or how they function and the chicken or the egg, is appropriate for this solve problems. This happens for many reasons, situation. Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, and unethical leadership is only one. This paper both college professors, performed experiments examines ethics at the organizational level and that reinforce the difficulty of separating the bad looks at several theories to demonstrate how barrel from the bad apple. unethical cultures arise in organizations, how to A shocking (literally) set of experiments recognize if there is an issue, and what to do in the early 1960s showed the majority of men about it. (65%) will follow the orders of a person in authority to shock someone—to death. Stanley The interaction of bad actors Milgram, an innovative social psychologist and and bad environment make instructor at Yale, recruited male volunteers it difficult to determine what between 20 to 50 years old from a variety of caused the unethical behavior. professions. Based on the experiment parameters, volunteers believed they would be a “student” or Bad Barrel or Bad Apple? “teacher” for the experiment. However, Milgram designed the experiment to assign all volunteers When people discuss why unethical problems as teachers while one of Milgram’s colleagues occur in organizations, they either blame the would serve as the student. The volunteers, as environment, a “bad barrel,” or the individuals teachers, were told to administer shocks to the involved, “bad apples.” Our discussion focuses learner for answering questions incorrectly as on the bad barrel, or organizational problems the experiment progressed. While the standard that lead to bad behavior. The bad barrel or bad voltage in an outlet is 120 volts, the people in the apple question produces a false dichotomy. Bad survey administered “shocks” up to 450 volts, actors can produce a bad environment causing enough voltage to potentially kill or seriously unethical behavior. However, a bad environment injure the student. Milgram demonstrated how may encourage good people to misbehave and do easy it is to convince ordinary people to obey bad things. The interaction of bad actors and bad an order that harms another individual. His environment make it difficult to determine what experiment indicates that a leader can easily caused the unethical behavior. create a bad barrel, with over half of their Hitler provides an extreme, but prime, followers willing to execute unethical orders.5 example of people accusing a bad apple of Accordingly, leaders possess unique abilities to producing a bad barrel. Hitler is known as the affect the organization’s ethical stance, either bad apple who led his country into WWII and negatively or positively. demonized the Jewish people, pursuing the Phillip Zimbardo, a Stanford professor, in “final solution” to exterminate them.3 The war his “Stanford Prison Experiment” found much can actually be traced back to the poor economic the same results but without a leader imposed environment and restrictions imposed by the set of ethics. His goal was to determine if prison Treaty of Versailles on Germany after WWI, brutality stemmed from sadistic prison guards which produced a bad barrel. Without the or if it stemmed from the prison environment. 72 | FEATURES InterAgency Journal Vol. 10, No. 4, 2019 He randomly assigned students the roles of unethical behavior, both in peace and war. prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment My Lai and Abu Ghraib bring up memories due to last two full weeks. Within a matter of of unethical and immoral behavior in units. days, the guards became increasingly aggressive Hundreds of people working for the Navy were and assertive. As the experiment went on, they implicated in the Fat Leonard scandal involving became more brutal and demanding, and started bribes, prostitutes, and gifts. Ninety-two Air hazing the prisoners. Zimbardo disbanded the Force officers were suspended for cheating on a experiment after only six days due to the brutal, missile exam, while many others were implicated dehumanizing treatment of the guards towards in cheating scandals.12 Gerras and Wong, who the prisoners. He found that people become research and teach at the U.S. Army War College, so immersed in the norms of the group that wrote an article on the normalization of lying they lose their own sense of individuality and to ourselves in the Army through unrealistic personal responsibility for their actions. This expectations in qualifications and reporting. The experiment was not as much about the authority list goes on. A few of the reasons organizations figure creating an unethical atmosphere as it become unethical are outlined in the following was about the environment, a bad barrel, which sections. created the unethical behavior.6 The unethical behavior became the norm and was widespread There are numerous examples throughout the organization. of organizations whose Examples of Organizations Gone Bad behaviors have drifted far from their espoused ethics. There are numerous examples of organizations whose behaviors have drifted far Moral Disengagement from their espoused ethics. These organizations include the gamut of public and private, Moral disengagement theory sheds further governmental and nongovernmental, religious light on the bad barrel phenomenon. Albert and secular organizations. Ford, with the Bandura, a Stanford research psychologist, Pinto and its exploding gas tank from rear end utilizes this theory to examine how large groups collisions, decided it was cheaper to pay the of people disassociate their unethical behavior claims from the families of those killed in the from any sense of personal responsibility. fire than it was to fix the problem.7 Volkswagen Bandura theorizes that religious, racial, and knowingly cheated on their emissions standards nationalistic rationalizations allow ordinary, to comply with U.S. emissions standards.8 Sears decent people throughout much of history to incentivized its mechanics to lie and cheat on commit atrocities while maintaining a sense of fixing cars by repairing things not broken.9 self-righteousness. Bandura includes Milgram’s Merck kept selling its lucrative drug Vioxx, study in using authority to diffuse responsibility, knowing that it was causing deaths.10 Wells as well as the feeling that if everyone is doing Fargo incentivized thousands of workers to it, then it must be all right.13 When everyone make up false accounts and overcharge their has some responsibility, then no one really feels customers to receive bonuses and to keep their ownership. Individuals become anonymous jobs.11 Just as no individual is impervious to in a crowd of others performing the same unethical conduct, no organization is inoculated unethical action. This easily happens in large from such possibilities. organizations. The military has numerous examples of Selective moral disengagement is the Arthur D. Simons Center for Interagency Cooperation, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas FEATURES | 73 means by which large groups of people and appear different, we can drift into illegal and organizations can commit horrendous acts of unethical activity without seeing it as such.

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