A few months ago I visited Houston to attend the 2013 meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). During that conference I presented an empirical study on ethical leadership. My co-authors and I found that ethical leadership is negatively related to deviance among work teams. Conversely, it is positively related to voluntary learning activities. Speaking very loosely, the evidence is consistent with the notion that ethical leadership increases effective work behavior, while decreasing problematic deviance. This is a classic “win-win” solution to performance problems. Supervisors benefit from superior performance (very broadly defined), while subordinates are treated justly and decently. Everyone is better off, other things being equal. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I suppose this goes in the good news / bad news category, depending on your outlook. Movoto.com, a real estate web site with some entertaining articles, recently posted results of their own research to determine the 10 most sinful US cities, using the traditional Seven Deadly Sins.
- Lust – Strip clubs per capita
- Pride – Cosmetic surgeons per capita
- Wrath – Violent crime per year per 1,000 residents
- Envy – Theft per year per 1,000 residents
- Greed – Percentage of disposable income given to charity each year
- Gluttony – Percentage of obese residents
- Sloth – Percentage of physically inactive residents
But before you get too excited, apparently the stand-out sin in Orlando is sloth. Woo-yawn-hoo!
Read more about the Movoto.com sin city study here, or about their counterpoint study on saintly cities (spoiler hint: New City?!) here. And you can read about their methodology here.
Recently, a Canadian physician, considered by some to be a kind of Robin Hood, has been exaggerating allergies and other conditions for patients on welfare so that they can get access to special dietary food allowances from the Canadian government, over 1.8 million dollars worth over the past four years. Although the physician, Dr. Roland Wong, is before the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for disciplinary action, his only regret is that “the government does not help the poor.”
WWTNS (What Would Thierry Nadisic Say)?!
Dr. Thierry Nadisic (EMLyon) has identified a phenomenon he defines as the Robin Hood Effect. He proposes that managers may use invisible remedies to restore organizational justice by allocating resources over which they have discretion to employees who have experienced some form of injustice. Specifically, he proposes that “invisible remedies can reduce the negative reactions resulting from distributive, procedural, and interactional injustices due to their ability to address employees’ instrumental, relational, and moral motives.”
Robin Hoodism may be pervasive in other contexts in which individual agents try to correct what they see as the injustice of organizations and institutions, as in the case of Dr. Wong.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Ultimate Popperian
I began teaching business ethics some years ago, as part of an MBA leadership course that I had prepared for the University of Arizona. Our college placed strong emphasis on economic thinking, so when I taught ethics I decided to emphasize what Carroll and Shabana (2011, International Journal of Management Reviews) have called the “business case.” That is, I argued that ethical and socially responsible behavior was “good business,” as it would promote long-term financial success. I knew that this was not the whole story, and I taught other perspectives as well. Still, the business case struck me as especially compelling to MBA students and, anyway, there was evidence to buttress my claims (for examples, see Orlitzky & Benjamin, 2001, Business and Society, and Orlitzky, Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003, Organization Studies). ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
When I was assistant professor, I was in full possession of the three qualities that characterize young scholars – educational loans, modest pay, and summers off. As the second quality was barely sufficient to meet the demands of the first, I used the third to supplement my income. In practice, this meant that I was leading organizational development activities, such as team-building exercises and action planning workshops. After a time, these sessions became somewhat routine, and I began to notice commonalities in people’s comments. Among each group’s developmental needs was something to the effect of “people around here need to take more risks.” Usually, it was one of the first items on every list, typically articulated right after “we need better communication” but just before “we need to show each other more respect.” ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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