Companies Need to Pay More Attention to Everyday Unethical Behavior

Many large scandals have sounded the alarm on the need to monitor corporate corruption. The typical response from policy makers is to propose a patchwork of reforms to address various corporate transgressions. But by and large, these reforms focus on preventing gross and blatant violations of the law – and they ignore the more banal, ordinary acts of unethicality that are far more common in organizations. Numerous studies have documented the prevalence of practices such as stealing office supplies, inflating business expenditures reports, and engaging in behaviors that raise conflicts of interest. While these may sound negligible, these violations reduce trust over time and alter prevailing business and legal norms. Their aggregated effect can be quite harmful. Behavioral ethics research suggests that this type of misconduct occurs not because people are unethical or deliberately choose to act unethically, but because they fail to understand that their behavior is indeed unethical and can have harmful consequences. Thus, sanctioning rule breaking and looking for “smoking guns” will not prevent most employees from acting unethically. If organizations want to do a better job at preventing misconduct, they need to adopt a two-stage approach. The first stage focuses on increasing people’s awareness of the illegality and unethicality of their behavior. The second stage is about ensuring that employees clearly recognize that misconduct will be penalized.