Confessional Reluctance and Ethics Enforcement: The Paradoxical Cost of Zero Tolerance

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Nontechnical Description In response to recent high profile ethical catastrophes, many organizations have adopted tougher ethical stances, the most extreme of which are "zero tolerance" policies, in which small infractions are substantially punished. Although punitive policies may reduce the base-rate of ethical violations, they may paradoxically increase major ethical infractions by discouraging employees' willingness to report violations. This phenomenon is referred to as confessional reluctance, defined as the resistance to disclosing ethical violations to peers and supervisors. Confessional reluctance could turn minor ethical violations into major ethical catastrophes, as organization members seek to cover-up their mistakes through deception, falsification of records, and other means. This research project will examine confessional reluctance across several studies with multiple methods, including archival, experimental and a real-world field study. This research is important because understanding and preventing organizational ethical catastrophes is essential to a functioning society. Ethical breaches take economic and social tolls among the general public, corporations and governments. By identifying a new way of understanding major ethical breaches, our research will suggest actionable strategies for decreasing them, including employee selection, improving work-team functioning, and implementing more proactive organizational ethical climates. Ultimately, this research will provide a straightforward and empirically-backed method for making organizations more ethical. Technical Description This project proposes a multilevel model linking punitive ethical climates, confessional reluctance and unethical escalation, and test it through archival, field and experimental studies. To better understand confessional reluctance - and to enable interventions to reduce it - this research also identify learning climate, team/lead-member exchange and prosocial motivation as key moderators of the punitiveness-confessional reluctance relationship. Study 1 provides preliminary evidence for confessional reluctance and its link to punitive ethical climates through an online survey. Studies 2, 3 and 4 examine the link between confessional reluctance, punitive ethical climate and the escalation of unethical behavior through experimental studies. Study 4 uses company annual reports to examine the link between punitive policies and major ethical infractions, and Study 5 provides a longitudinal test of the model in the field. This research extends the literature by combining organizational variables (i.e., climate) and individual variables (i.e., prosocial motivation) into a multilevel framework. Our approach harnesses the complementary strengths of different methodologies, including the control of the lab, the realism of archival studies, and the generalizability of field samples. The lab studies provide rigorous manipulations of punitive climate with realistic simulations of organizational behavior and behavioral measures of ethical violations and confessional reluctance. The archival study extends our model to a range of companies, and the longitudinal field study examines our full model across branches of a corporation. Our interdisciplinary approach uses the tools of organizational behavior and experimental social psychology to extend our understanding of ethical behavior. Our model is particularly transformative because it contradicts basic intuitions about management. An understandable reaction to ethical breaches is to make an ethical climate more punitive, but this can paradoxically make major ethical violations more likely. Therefore, this research suggests a concrete intervention for making organizations more ethical.