“It is only when a person acts voluntarily that he does a just or unjust act. When he acts involuntarily his action is neither just nor unjust.” - Aristotle
“That government is best which governs least.” - Henry David Thoreau
Ethical behavior is a burden freely chosen.
The previous post discussed insights of motivational science that are critical for influencing human behavior. This post will consider how these insights can be applied to the field of ethics management. Specifically, the following questions will be discussed:
- How would we design an ethics management strategy based on Self-Determination Theory?
- How can insights from motivational science help us make components of ethics management programs, such as training, more effective?
The Two Sides Of Ethical Behavior
Before detailing how companies can motivate employees to behave ethically, a definition of what we mean by ethical behavior is called for. Albert Bandura, the most frequently cited living psychologist, provides an excellent definition of ethical behavior, although he refers to it by the name of moral agency.
Moral agency has a dual aspect. The inhibitive aspect of moral agency is expressed in the power to refrain from harmful acts (as reflected in the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians – first, do no harm). Ethics & Compliance programs often times focus on this inhibitive aspect, by seeking to constrain norm violations.
Moral agency, however, has an important second, promotive aspect. Promotive moral agency refers to people’s ability to enact pro-social behavior. In an organizational context, promotive moral agency can be expressed in many forms. Employees can play a preventative role in maintaining social norms, for example by role-modeling social norms, being attentive to risks, proposing or developing risk mitigation measures, injecting ethical considerations into decision-making, encouraging others to act ethically, or counseling, supporting, and praising others in their ethical agency. Employees can demonstrate their moral agency also by intervening in acute situations, by practicing dissent against misconduct, enlisting support from the Ethics & Compliance department or other appropriate governance functions, coming to the aid of victims of misconduct, or protecting whistle-blowers from retaliation. In the following, the term moral agency is used synonymously with the term ethical behavior, and it encompasses both the inhibitive and promotive aspects as described above.
The promotive aspect of moral agency highlights the fact that people are not only the passive, receiving object of social norms; they are also their active, generative subject. Not only are people governed by social norms, they also have the desire and the capacity to participate in shaping the norms that govern their lives.
This second aspect, promotive moral agency, is indispensable for a resilient ethical culture. An ethical culture remains frail when employees’ concern themselves only with their own rule-conforming behavior, but otherwise remain disengaged from the ethical challenges beyond the realm of their personal purview. The best immune system against unethical conduct is a community of individuals who rise up when needed to affirm and defend the values the community cares about. The shared practice of moral agency in everyday life is the primary conduit by which members of a community form, sustain and change social norms.
Most of the behaviors described as promotive moral agency are referred in organizational studies as extra-role behaviors or organizational citizenship behaviors. These are behaviors that contribute to organizational functioning but fall outside of employees’ formal job requirements. As such, promotive moral agency relies more strongly on self-motivation.
Ethics Strategy Based On Motivational Science
The question then arises: How can organizations foster ethical behavior, thus understood as a shared, self-motivated and promotive practice? Based on motivational science, organizations can promote ethical behavior by creating an environment where behaving ethically supports employees’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. The following points illustrate how each of these basic psychological needs can be supported in the context of ethics management.
To support autonomy:
- Expand employees’ opportunities to bring their whole selves to work, including their moral values.
- Provide employees with opportunities to actively co-construct the shared values that are essential for the organization and to participate in upholding these values.
To support competence
- Make it the fundamental modus operandi of ethics management to support employees in fully actualizing their human potential for moral agency.
- Provide employees easy access to the resources (information, skills, tools) that they need to master with confidence the challenges that moral agency entails.
- Approach employees with positive regard. Adopt a strength-based, rather than a deficit-based stand towards employees. Show appreciation for employees’ acquired values, experience and problem-solving skills and put them to good use in the company’s governance process.
- Systematically build employee feedback into the company’s engagement with employees. Actively seek out employee’s input on governance-related issues (e.g., identifying risks, ideating governance solutions).
To support relatedness:
- Promote an inclusive workplace where employees can experience a positive and stable sense of belonging. Mutual respect, caring, and trust create the necessary psychological safety for critical thinking, taking risks, and giving voice to values.
- Put positive, direct engagement with employees at the center of the Ethics function’s mission. In addition to communicating to employees, stimulate two-way communication, by systematically seeking employees’ input by asking questions and listening actively.
By supporting employees’ autonomy, competence and relatedness in the ways described above, companies can support employees’ moral agency and become more ethically resilient as a result. As this brief list indicates, Self-Determination Theory can provide a useful frame for generating a new set of principles to guide a company’s ethics management strategy.
Ethics Training Based On Motivational Science
Let us now get more granular by considering how we might apply Self-Determination Theory to make an ethics program, specifically training, more engaging and effective. The following points provide suggestions for designing ethics training that supports learners’ needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.
To support learners’ need for autonomy:
- Focus the training objective on autonomy-support. Support employees in their capacity to act as competent moral agents who are actively engaged in shaping and upholding the values that are critical to the company’s success.
- Provide a compelling reason for why the learner will benefit. Compliance training often is mandatory. The obligatory nature of the training should not be invoked needlessly as a reason to complete the training. Instead, a meaningful rationale for why training participation is valuable to the learner should be given (e.g., “This training offers valuable skills we can use to help maintain a positive and respectful work environment.”).
- Avoid language that could be perceived as controlling or threatening. Ethics training typically entails information about disciplinary consequences associated with misconduct. When addressing disciplinary consequences, the topic should be addressed in an informational tone. Threats of punishment should not be used as a motivational device.
- Build choice into the learning experience. Allow self-directed learning and adaptive navigation. Let learners determine when and where they complete the training. Allow learners to adjust the depth of learning to their unique needs (e.g. by offering supplemental content that learners can explore as desired).
- Keep training to a reasonable length. Many learners will freely pay attention to the first twenty minutes of training. As time advances, their interest wanes, their capacity to absorb additional information is exhausted and the training exercise begins to feel forced.
To support learners’ need for competence:
- Activate the relevant capabilities employees already have. Emphasize employees’ capacity for moral agency. Recognize the valuable competencies that employees bring to the shared responsibility of upholding organizational values. Make use of employees’ contextualized knowledge and problem-solving skills by facilitating active learner participation. Activate participants to consider ethical dimensions of their work and ideate solutions. What are risk areas? How can these risks be managed? What, if anything, could be done to manage these risks better? Communicate to learners that you will use their collective input for the continuous improvement of your company’s ethics management system.
- Extend employees’ capacities for moral agency. Use training as a platform for employees to further hone their competencies in moral agency across the entire governance value chain (e.g., risk identification, prevention, intervention, enlisting support from governance functions). To act competently and appropriately as a moral agent requires some basic skills, in particular skills for affirming values confidently and effectively, even under pressure. Make sure deliberative skills occupy a central place in your organizations’ learning and development priorities. Support stakeholders in developing their deliberative mastery by offering continuous opportunities to learn about and apply deliberative methods.
To enhance learners’ feeling of relatedness:
- Approach learners as valued allies, rather than mistrusted risk factors. Apply style and content that makes learners feel respected and appreciated. For example, use language that promotes a feeling of shared responsibility, rather than an us-vs.-them mentality. For example, when addressing behavioral requirements, the use of second- or third-person pronouns (“you/they/employees should/must”) can create distance between trainer and learner. The use of first-person plural pronouns (“we/all of us should/must”) has less of a distancing effect.
- Create a collaborative learning environment. Create opportunities for learners to jointly solve ethically challenging situations.
- Surface shared commitments to values. Sometimes, people fail to act against a norm violation because they are uncertain whether others around them view the violation as problematic as well. Since we are typically not wearing our values on our sleeves, moral ambiguity can result in the bystander effect, where no one intervenes. Many basic moral values, however, are widely shared. Use training as an opportunity for participants to surface their own normative commitments and highlight commonalities.
- Strengthen psychological safety. Create a positive learning environment where participants build trust among each other to speak candidly about problems and discuss divergent viewpoints. Build trust that the company supports and protects those who speak up against misconduct.
Research Findings
A growing body of research on ethics training, in particular as it applies to the areas of sexual harassment and diversity, supports this view. One such study, conducted by Frank Dobbin at Harvard and Alexandra Kalev at Tel Aviv University, compared two types of training aimed at promoting diversity and reducing harassment. The first type of training approaches the learner as a potential perpetrator and is centered around a forbidden-behavior curriculum. Let us call this type of training offender training.
The second type of training approaches the learner as a potential ally in upholding the norms of diversity and non-harassment. It supports learners not only in recognizing misconduct, but also in their capacity and confidence to prevent and intervene against problematic behavior effectively. Let us refer to this training as intervention training (so-called Bystander training, Giving Voice To Values training, or Upstander training are all variants of this type).
According to the research described by Dobbin and Kalev, offender training has been found to produce adverse effects. It activates gender stereotypes and causes backlash against women. Offender training makes men less likely to see coercion of a subordinate as sexual harassment, less likely to report harassment, more likely to blame the victim and engage in harassment. Further, this type of training was associated with reductions in women in management.
The studies found positive outcomes, by contrast, when intervention training was implemented. Participants in intervention training demonstrated increased confidence about intervening and intention to intervene as well as increased actual intervention and helping behavior.
If we are interested in stimulating ethical behavior, then motivational science points in a clear direction: We need to foster a positive sense of community, support employees’ skills and confidence as moral agents, and expand their opportunities to participate in governance. In this sense, ethics is the freedom to be moral agents, to define and defend as a community the values that bind us.
Getting Started
Supporting employees’ moral agency should be at the center of organizations’ ethics management strategy. Employees’ basic psychological needs are supported when organizations engage with employees as allies who can make a valuable contribution to constructing and upholding the values that are critical for organizational success. Doing so strengthens employees’ sense of relatedness, competence, and autonomy.
Innovation-minded practitioners who are interested in developing high-engagement ethics programs should therefore take a closer look at motivational science. It offers empirically robust, actionable insights that promise to relieve some of the symptoms that often times afflict control-oriented programs, such as compliance fatigue, poor training outcomes, or low reporting rates.
Organizations interested in integrating the insights of motivational science into their ethics program can start by taking the following three steps:
- Build Awareness: Engage ethics and compliance practitioners via presentations or workshops to equip them with a foundational understanding of motivational science and its relevance for their work.
- Align The Ethics Strategy: Review the organization’s ethics strategy to ensure that program design is aligned with the objective of high employee engagement.
- Realign Program Elements: Realign employee-facing program elements, such as training, codes of conduct, ethics homepages, or incident reporting websites. Build measurement into the process to demonstrate impact.
What Are Your Thoughts?
How can organizations create an environment that supports ethical motivation and behavior? What works and what does not? – I would love to hear your thoughts. Please join the conversation by commenting, liking, or sharing. You can find my related LinkedIn post here and my Twitter post here.
Previous
This post is part of the Ethics 2.0 column, a series on self-governance in organizations. You might also enjoy these posts:
And Now Ethics 2.0: An Argument For More Self-Governance
Compliance Vs. Self-Governance: A Brief History Of Two Governance Paradigms
The Moral Law Within: The Scientific Case For Self-Governance
