Organizational Moral Learning

A Communication Approach

Ryan Bisel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317312512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Winner of two National Communication Association awards:

Communication Ethics Division's 2018 Single-Author Book of the Year Award

Organizational Communication Division's 2018 Outstanding Book of the Year Award

Extensive work in psychology and neuroscience reveals that individuals are born with moral intuitions, and this volume capitalizes on that recent insight to provide a new perspective on how to lead organizational ethics. Organizational Moral Learning presents communication-based recommendations for managers and leaders to encourage authentic moral dialogue at work so that these discussions can be used to update work practices vigilantly as organizations strive for ethical excellence. Organizational ethics are crucial to individual, organizational, national, and even global well-being, and this work leads a revolution in thinking about how to manage organizational ethics. Written accessibly for students and practitioners alike, this book provides a leading-edge look at organizational ethics based on science and research applicable to a worldwide audience.

1
Rethinking Organizational Ethics Training

Remember the feeling? Being forced to listen to another ethics trainer, clicking through another organizationally mandated online ethics training, or reading another memo from Human Resources railing against everyone for one particular employee’s bad behavior. Ever get the sense that these well-meaning talks are really just telling you what you have known since kindergarten? Don’t take others’ belongings. Be kind. Treat others fairly. Clean up after yourself. This book is not an attack on ethics training or how ethics tends to be led in the workplace, but it is an attempt to be honest about it. We value ethics as a good all-unto-itself and we want members of our organizations to make ethical decisions. We know good organizational ethics is good for the bottom line (or, perhaps more accurately, public condemnation of unethical organizational behavior is bad for the bottom line); we like to be identified with groups and organizations with positive reputations. We certainly don’t like to be on the receiving end of others’ bad behavior. Values like these motivate us to want to encourage ethical behavior and decisions in our workplace.

To those ends, we train ethics. When we treat ethics as trainable we operate from a pattern we have experienced throughout our lives. As children, we were taught (read, trained) in ethics. Is it any wonder why we look to the patterns and strategies displayed by parents, guardians, coaches, and teachers, who taught us morals from the beginning, as the scripts for how to encourage ethical behaviors from others in the workplace? That script reads like this: If you want better behavior and decision making, you need to teach morals. Of course, I teach my own children the need to share and take turns (among many other fundamentals). When I teach these ideas, I am basically following the notion that if my kids know better, they’ll do better. I train ethics in my home. However, what if that script of “knowing better” to “do better” is right for children but not necessarily a good fit for encouraging ethical behavior from working adults? How might rethinking the underlying assumptions of ethics training and ethics leadership reframe how we go about encouraging ethical workplaces?

When we attempt to teach ethics to working adults we are assuming that the core issue with misbehavior is a lack of ethical knowledge, but is the issue really that working adults do not know better and that is why they are not doing better? Are unethical organizational members really just ethically unintelligent or uninformed? The truth is many of our strategies and attempts designed to encourage organizational ethics seem to make that assumption. This book challenges that assumption and, in turn, formulates a complementary (and at times different) set of strategies for leading organizational ethics to what is common in the modern workplace with its codes of conduct and standardized ethics trainings.

The first section of this book attempts to show how applying the scripts of individual moral instruction used by the authority figures of our youth is not the only available, or even the most appropriate, means to leading ethical behavior in the workplace. But I wish to emphasize that many extremely intelligent, skillful, and right-motived individuals train ethics. The content of this book joins with their ultimate desire to encourage moral excellence in the workplace. Yet, in this book, I integrate leading-edge scientific findings into a new perspective on leading organizational ethics, which invites us to rethink our first assumptions about how encouraging ethical behavior works.

There are many widely held assumptions about organizational ethics, ethical behavior, and ethical decision making that I hope to unpack throughout the course of the following pages and chapters. But before I venture too far, I need to give you a sense of why I approach the issue of leading organizational ethics differently: I am an organizational communication scholar. As such, I want to begin the process of describing a new way of thinking about leading organizational ethics by drawing your attention to a powerful insight about organizations and organizational communication. This insight hints at the profoundly social aspect of leading organizational ethics that cannot be merely reduced to improving individuals’ ethical reasoning. The traditional approach to leading organizational ethics tends to view ethical thinkers as individuals with brains that work to reason ethically with greater or lesser success. Here, the idea is that the whole can merely be reduced to the sum of its parts. The idea goes that ethics is an issue of reasoning and smart people do it better. From this perspective, if you want a more ethical organization, you need to get a bunch of intelligent thinkers together to work toward a common goal. The trouble is some very smart people have created some truly evil organizations, and even nation states. I do not mean to suggest that intelligent people are necessarily evil. I do suggest that leading ethical organizations has less to do with how individuals think and more to do with how groups of individuals talk with one another. That point resonates with a different view of organizational ethics that is informed by organizational communication. Consider the following insight, given to us by organizational communication research:

Group talk is group thought—five little words with enormous implications for leaders. Sure, most sane individuals can think without talking to themselves (so I hear). However, groups of individuals cannot “think” as a group without talk. Talk makes individuals’ private thoughts available for public discussion and collective adjustments. Think of it this way: If smart organizations were merely the collection of smart individuals then the best organizations could be created by collecting high-powered, high-intellect brains. Those brains could then be placed in jars and arranged around an executive meeting table. Voila! A brilliant organization. (Not so much). Of course, the brains at that table could never rise to the level of organization until they are able to communicate with one another in order to decide on collective goals and decide how to coordinate the best courses of action to achieve those goals.

Organizational communication scholars have written extensively about the idea that communication not only occurs within organizations, but also, in a real sense, organizations are communicational (Bisel, 2010; McPhee & Zaug, 2000; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). In other words, organizations cannot exist in the absence of communication. This idea is central because it helps us understand organizations for what they are, namely, different than individuals. Sure, an individual could exist without communicating—although that existence does not sound fun, safe, or sustainable for the long term. Organizations, on the other hand, cannot exist without communication because that is what they are. In fact, the communicational nature of organizations led the famed Karl Weick (1969) to encourage us to speak more often with the verb organizing than the noun organization to help us think more carefully about how intimately organizing is tied up with ongoing communication. In short, when organizations are constituted by high-quality communication, the organization by fact thrives. When organizations are constituted by low-quality, unproductive, misguided communication, the organization by fact falters.

The organizational catastrophes experienced by the United States’ National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA)—such as the Challenger and Columbia disasters—are great examples of how extremely learned and intelligent brains can combine together to make poor decisions because of poor-quality communication patterns. Retrospective analyses of these disasters confirm that communication troubles among these rocket scientists were largely to blame for the disasters. The issue was not a deficiency of individuals’ thoughts—individuals within the Administration warned others about the troubles that would eventually result in catastrophe. The issue was a deficiency of group-level thought, in that individuals’ warnings were not taken seriously enough in group-level talk to shape courses of action and avert catastrophe. In short, individuals can think without saying a word, but groups cannot think collectively without communication. What is more, the quality of group talk (be it of poor or rich quality) is the quality of group thought and the quality of the organization being produced.

On January 28, 1986, Challenger fell out of the sky only 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members and horrifying a nation. Organizational communication scholars who studied NASA in the aftermath of the disaster were able to pinpoint key problems with how groups within the Agency talked, and therefore, thought. Prior to the disaster, mid-level managers’ way of talking shifted from reinforcing the idea that a launch “should be canceled if there is any doubt of its safety” to talking with subordinates and lower-level engineers in ways that reinforced the idea a scheduled launch would “proceed unless there is conclusive evidence that it is unsafe to do so” (Hirokawa, Gouran, & Martz, 1988, p. 423). The Agency’s history seemed to repeat itself on February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during launch. The Agency’s own internal analysis of the crisis blames, in part, communication problems. The self-study describes that prior to the disaster, upward dissenting emails from concerned engineers were ignored by management or resulted in “face-to-face heated arguments with no follow-up action” (National Aeronautics Space Agency, 2011, p. 9). Elsewhere, the self-study reveals that organizational members began to play by unwritten communication rules, such as, “Don’t email managers in high positions” (p. 9). Meanwhile, management worked according to a communication norm in which they passed information to lower ranks but believed passing information upwardly to top-level decision makers was not their job description. One organizational member reported being told by a manager, “I integrate information down, not upward” (p. 9). Those kinds of communication patterns gave rise to a quality of organizing that was bound to result in catastrophe. Taken together, the story of these catastrophes illustrates how organizing arises from a web of relationships among thinking, communicating, deciding, and organizing. Many more insights from organizational communication are described throughout the book and leveraged to offer a new perspective of leading organizational ethics. However, for now, consider another basic truth of communication:

No one has direct access to anyone else’s cognition. There always remains some gap between our individual cognition and what we are able to (or are willing to) share with others about our thoughts through our messaging. I think of this separation as a profoundly auspicious set of circumstances. I am glad that there is a distance between what I am thinking and what I can tell others I am thinking. Go ahead; think about it. Isn’t it nice that others do not necessarily know what you are thinking? Some may assume that reducing the discrepancy between private thoughts and public communication is the ideal goal of skillful communicators. In some circumstances, like explaining to a lover your feelings, this might be the case. However, communication is not merely judged by whether our messaging reproduces our private thoughts accurately and faithfully.

In fact, communicating can call into being a different—sometimes advantageous and sometimes disadvantageous—set of social circumstances contrary to or in addition to our private thoughts. Imagine your boss asks you to complete a task that you think is doomed to fail or could cause you and your department embarrassment. That private cognition is probably not what a skillful communicator would share with the boss. Could you imagine saying the following to your boss: “Stupid idea. This is going to cause us huge embarrassment. Think about what you are asking of your people before you open your big, fat mouth again.” We know that, even if those are accurate representations of our private thoughts, such words would trigger a series of task and relationship consequences that would make life harder. Thus, we shape those private thoughts into public communication, which we hope will elicit far better task and relationship outcomes. Instead, the most communicatively and politically skillful among us would probably use politeness strategies, like asking questions, feigning confusion, using humor, and many others, in order to maintain a positive impression with the boss while also finding a way to reshape the task directive. In this way, communication is not merely a reflection of private thoughts. Communication is its own force that presents private thoughts in specific ways, to specific audiences, and creates new social situations that could not be present without communication. In short, communication matters.

What does all that have to do with organizational ethics? These ideas begin to hint at the possibility that organizational ethics is not only a matter of individuals’ moral cognition. Perhaps communication also shares an important role in creating social situations for how ethics plays out in the workplace. The pages of this book explain how organizational communication mediates the private ethical concerns and aspirations of individuals and how those private ethical thoughts scale up (or not) to ethical organizing. For now, however, I review the track record of organizational ethics and training programs designed to improve individuals’ moral cognitions. The point here is to review how the traditional approach to encouraging ethical behavior in the workplace is faring. In other words, how effective is the organizational programming that originates in a know better to do better assumption?

Organizational and Business Ethics Training: The Tale of the Tape

Perhaps now, more than ever, there is a growing awareness that unethical organizational actors can threaten individual, corporate, national, and even global stability. The institutionalized, unethical actions of Wall Street brought the world near the brink of economic collapse in 2008. This context motivates well-intentioned managers and executives to take action. Because training seems like the remedy to what ails the organization, it makes sense that many turn to corporate trainers to educate workers about ethics and morals in the workplace.

But how effective is organizational and business ethics training in curbing unethical behavior? On par, it is not. As frustrating as that answer might seem, it is the empirical answer. I assume that many who read these pages have participated in organizational or business ethics training at some point in time because the practice of training ethics is so ubiquitous. The common training and teaching strategy involves learning about principles of ethical decision making—perhaps via reading an article or listening to a lecture—and then reading case-study scenarios that present difficult ethical choices for the protagonist. Learners then are directed to discuss the key issues and render a convincing reason for their proposed ethical course of action. These scenarios tend to be dry, distant, abstract, unemotional, and contrived—none of which are characteristics of the ethical situations that actually face us in the workplace. These kinds of case-based ethics training strategies are commonplace and they give us the sense that we are doing something to educate workers about ethics and curb unethical behavior.

Yet, when put to the test of scientific scrutiny, these training approaches—although highly common—are not consistently beneficial in improving ethical behavior. Empirical work conducted on the effectiveness of ethics training reveals two takeaways: First, studies frequently find uneven or short-lived effects of ethics training on participants’ moral awareness or moral reasoning. Second, many studies that find such equivocal results measure reasoning about ethics, not whether more morally excellent conduct actually ensues in the workplace. Let’s start with the first point.

Research on organizational and business ethics training reveals inconsistent, unstable, and equivocal results. In a study of business ethics education implemented with 77 undergraduate students, a researcher conducted a standard business ethics training in which, “Students were exposed to real-life fictional case studies that asked them to apply the ethical principles they had learned to a particular business case scenario” (Ritter, 2006, p. 157). Sound familiar? The researcher then conducted a rigorous assessment of the training’s effectiveness in improving students’ moral awareness and reasoning. About half the students were given the ethics training and half were not. The stage was set to see if the business ethics training mattered. Ultimately, the data revealed the undergraduates who received the training and those who did not were not different in their moral awareness and reasoning. The ethics training did not seem to have measurable effects. Elsewhere, a researcher conducted a somewhat similar study with business students. This time students were tested right after training and again in four weeks. Their disapproval of unethical business scenarios waned measurably, leading the researcher to lament the transient effects of limited ethics training and call for “more extensive training provided through either a separate ethics course or through incorporation of ethics training into a number of courses in the business curriculum” (Richards, 1999, p. 332). The effects of the ethics training were not stable but declined within a single month after the training.

Perhaps, as Richards (1999) suggested, ethics training needs to be more thoroughly implemented over a longer period of time? In other words, perhaps the problem is one of limited exposure. The claim might go like this: A single training session is not enough to make trainees more ethically intelligent. They need more intense exposure to the ethics-medicine. Not likely. In yet another similar study, about 150 business college students who were just entering college, were compared with nearly 150 college students who were near completion of their degree. The question was, who reported valuing positive virtues more, the first-year business college students or the seniors? The senior college students were exposed to ethics education throughout the duration of their four-year college experience. An entire college degree worth of coursework, lectures, assignments, and discussions separated the entering first-year business students from their exiting senior counterparts. Surely, seniors were sufficiently exposed to the ethics-medicine to make them know ethics better, right? Disturbingly, seniors reported valuing generosity, idealism, compassion, critical and questioning attitude toward authority, friendliness, and honesty significantly less than their first-year student counterparts (Allen, Bacdayan, Kowalski, & Roy, 2005). Yikes. In this case, the medicine of ethics training in college business education is not just benign, it is actual harming ethics-based performance. Elsewhere, organizational ethicists have noted, “Although business ethics courses are now an accepted part of the… curriculum.… The few studies that have been done show inconclusive results” (Murphy & Boatright, 1994, p. 326); others reflect, “those studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of ethics education programs tend to report equivocal results, where the causal link between the ethics education program and the transfer of knowledge to the real world setting is ambiguous” (Halbesleben, Wheeler, & Buckley, 2005, p. 386). What is going on? Why does ethics seem to be difficult to teach in a meaningful way to college students?

Perhaps, these findings are merely an artifact of the moral or intellectual “immaturity” of college students? Again, that is just not a likely explanation for these findings. In another ethics training study, the participants were hundreds of post-doctoral research fellows. Participants were funded by the National Institute for Health because of their extraordinary research acumen. In other words, participants were some of the brightest, most-educated, minds society has to offer. At the conclusion of training, very few changes in the research fellows’ ethically appropriate behavioral judgments about research ethics were detected after exposure to the training. Thus, whether participants are college students or doctors the story of the effectiveness of ethics training remains unimpressive.

Furthermore, I find it quite remarkable how easy it is to find peer-reviewed published articles that confirm organizational ethics training has short-lived, minute, or no effect on participants. Why? Because as a social scientist I know how very difficult it is to get editors to publish non-significant findings—the kind of findings that these ethics training studies represent. Editors of peer-reviewed journals are motivated to publish studies that “worked out” as planned, which means statistically significant effects of interventions were detected. In the social sciences, the conventional hypothesis-testing approach to knowledge creation requi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Rethinking Organizational Ethics Training
• 2 Moral Intuition: Advances in Moral Psychology and Neuroscience
• 3 The Social Intuitionist Model
• 4 Communication and the New Organizational Ethics
• 5 How Cultur(ing) Works
• 6 Pluralistic Moral Ignorance and Spirals of Silent Misdirection
• 7 Here-and-Now Ethics Talk in the Workplace
• 8 Substituting Here-and-Now Ethics Talk
• 9 Sensemaking and Identity: What to Expect from Moral Reasoning
• 10 Organizational Learning and Organizational Communication
• 11 From Individual Moral Intuition to Organizational Moral Learning
• 12 Organizing for Moral Mindfulness
• 13 Stories of Organizational Moral Learning and Ignorance
• 14 Communication Practices for Managing Moral Mindfulness
• References
• Index