Denying What Workers Believe Are Unethical Workplace Requests

Abstract

This message-production experiment demonstrates workers' tendency to use organizational policy justifications when publicly denying what they privately believe are unethical requests. Working adults (N = 234) responded to an unethical request from a supervisor, coworker, or subordinate. Participants avoided using explicitly moralized justifications for their noncompliance publicly and thus engaged in issue crafting. Specifically, content and statistical analyses revealed that (a) most participants invoked policy justifications to deny requests and (b) differences in hierarchical relationships were not significantly associated with policy justification frequency. These dynamics afford important face-saving functions but hold implications for the moral learning capacity of organizations. The essay concludes with implications for crafting organizational ethics policy.

Supervisor Moral Talk Contagion and Trust-in-Supervisor

“…The results support that a moral mum effect is observable across participants' responses, χ 2 (df = 1, N = 324) = 125.94, p < .001, Cramér's V = .39. Thus, the moral mum effect was replicated (Bisel & Kramer, 2014). A contingency table analysis was conducted to test the first hypothesis.…”

“…See Table 1 for a description of the scenario prompts. Similar to Bisel and Kramer (2014), participants were prompted to believe that the request was a violation of company policy (i.e., You believe the expense is a clear violation of the employee wage policy ). Also, the scenario contained an operational component (i.e., Furthermore, if you write this check, no money will be left in discretionary funds for the rest of the month ).…”

“…Not surprisingly, employees soften (Ploeger, Kelley, & Bisel, 2011), obscure (Lucas & Fyke, 2013), or refrain from (Bisel & Kramer, 2014) voicing upward ethical dissent because of fear of retribution (Bisel & Arterburn, 2012) and potentially threatening powerful individuals’ public images (Bisel, Messersmith, & Kelley, 2012). Studies of the mum effect —or individuals’ reluctance to provide negative feedback to one another for fear of damaging relationships—have a long history in interpersonal research (see Dibble & Levine, 2010).…”

“…For employees, the game of politeness is no less important, especially when supervisors’ impressions are tied to monetary outcomes (Morand, 2000). Given the costs and rewards to the individual, it is not surprising that individuals avoid denying unethical requests on ethical grounds to prevent face threats (Bisel & Kramer, 2014).…”

“…Yet, an obstacle to accountability is the moral mum effect, which has been identified, tested, and replicated and may be typical of workplace language patterns (Bisel, Kelley, Ploeger, & Messersmith, 2011). Moral mum effect refers to individuals' reluctance to engage in explicitly moralized objections to unethical requests (Bisel & Kramer, 2014). Typical organizational discourses tend to render issues of ethics and morality regarding the here-and-now undiscussable in the workplace (Bird, 1996).…”