According to the bad apple theory, people are good or bad and organizations are
powerless to change
these folks. This bad apple idea16 is
appealing in part because
unethical behavior
can then be blamed on a few individuals with poor character.
Although it’s
unpleasant to fire people, it’s relatively easier for organizations to
search for and
discard a few bad apples than to search for some organizational
problem that caused
the apple to rot.
Despite the appeal of
the bad apple idea, ‘‘character’’ is a poorly defined concept,
and when people talk
about it, they rarely define what they mean. They’re probably
referring to a
complex combination of traits that are thought to guide individual behavior in
ethical dilemma situations. If character guides ethical conduct, training
shouldn’t make much
difference because character is thought to be relatively stable:
it’s difficult to
change, persists over time, and guides behavior across different contexts.
Character develops
slowly as a result of upbringing and the accumulation of
values that are
transmitted by schools, families, friends, and religious organizations.
Therefore, people
come to educational institutions or work organizations with an
already defined good
or poor character. Good apples will be good and bad apples
will be bad.
In fact, people do
have predispositions to behave ethically or unethically. And sociopaths can
certainly slip into organizations with the sole intent of helping themselves to
the organization’s resources, cheating customers, and feathering their own
nests at the expense of others. Famous scoundrels like Bernie Madoff definitely
come to mind. Such individuals have little interest in ‘‘doing the right
thing,’’ and when this type of individual shows up in your organization, the
best thing to do is discard the bad apple and make an example of the incident to
those who remain.
But discarding bad
apples generally won’t solve an organization’s problem with
unethical behavior.
The organization must scrutinize itself to determine if something
rotten inside the
organization is spoiling the apples. For example, Enron encouraged
a kind of
devil-may-care, unethical culture that is captured in the film, Enron: The
Smartest Guys in the
Room. Arthur Andersen’s culture morphed from a focus on the
integrity of audits
to a consulting culture that focused almost exclusively on feeding
the bottom line. You’ll
learn that most people are not guided by a strict internal moral compass.
Rather, they look outside themselves—to their environment—for cues about how to
think and behave. This was certainly true in the financial crisis when the
mantra became ‘‘everyone is doing it’’ (and making a lot of money besides). At
work, managers and the organizational culture transmit many cues about how
employees should think and act. For example, reward systems play a huge role by
rewarding short-term thinking and profits, as they did in the recent financial
crisis. You’ll learn about theimportance of these organizational influences and
how to harness them to support ethical behavior and avoid unethical behavior.
So, apples often turn
bad because they’re spoiled by ‘‘bad barrels’’—bad work
environments that not
only condone, but may even expect unethical behavior. Most
employees are not bad
folks to begin with. But their behavior can easily turn bad if
they believe that
their boss or their organization expects them to behave unethically
or if everyone else
appears to be engaging in a particular practice. In this view, an
organization that’s
serious about supporting ethical behavior and preventing misconduct
must delve deeply
into its own management systems and cultural norms and
practices to search
for systemic causes of unethical behavior. Management must take
responsibility for
the messages it sends or fails to send about what’s expected. If
ethics problems are
rooted in the organization’s culture, discarding a few bad apples
without changing that
culture isn’t going to solve the problem. An effective and lasting
solution will rely on
management’s systematic attention to all aspects of the organization’s culture
and what it is explicitly or implicitly ‘‘teaching’’ organizational
members.
This question about
the source of ethical and unethical behavior reflects the
broader
‘‘nature/nurture’’ debate in psychology. Are we more the result of our genes
(nature) or our
environments (nurture)? Most studies find that behavior results from
both nature and nurture.
So, when it comes to ethical conduct, the answer is not
either/or, but and. Individuals
do come to work with predispositions that influence
their behavior, and
they should take responsibility for their own actions. But the
work environment can
also have a large impact.
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