The Need for Ethical Leadership: Moral Compass, Courage, and Obedience (Flashcards)
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Theme: The need for ethical leadership hinges on a moral compass and courage.
Social learning and modeling:
People look for signals in their surroundings to decide how to behave.
Observing others giving (or littering) increases the likelihood we will imitate those actions.
We weight the behavior of role models more heavily, especially those we view as significant or desirable to reflect in our own behavior.
Role models and signaling norms:
Role models within or outside one’s group have a stronger influence on behavior than ordinary peers.
The experiment by Kees Keizer demonstrates that the model’s status matters when signaling normative behavior.
Keizer’s flyer experiment (Knowledge magazine):
Setup: Flyers attached to bicycle handlebars with the message about plagiarism and a photo of a professor in a toga or a student; a blank area with no trash bin nearby.
Text variations:
“The majority of …, 80 percent, commit plagiarism. Read all about it in Knowledge.”
One set claimed 80 percent of professors commit plagiarism (with professor photo).
Another set claimed 80 percent of students commit plagiarism (with student photo).
Results: On the student flyer, 39% of cyclists threw it on the ground; on the professor flyer, 52% threw it away.
Interpretation: The group’s norm symbol (professor vs student) influenced the likelihood of littering, with professors as role models having a stronger normative influence on students than student-role models.
Implications:
Those who symbolize group norms are more influential in determining behavior than ordinary group members.
The environment (no trash can) also matters; the absence of facilitation reinforces normative behavior.
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Context: Ethical leadership in organizations.
Leadership as role modeling:
Directors, managers, and leaders are key role models within and around organizations and are expected to embody organizational norms.
The higher the position, the greater the impact of their behavior on others.
Empirical finding:
My own research shows that when management sets a good example, significantly less unethical behavior is observed across the organization than when management sets a bad example.
32 aspects of unethical behavior were measured (e.g., cheating consumers, squeezing suppliers, deceiving shareholders, unfair competition, human-rights violations).
Expectations and critique:
Employees and outsiders frequently criticize the lack of top-management role-modeling.
The positive side: there is an expectation that top management should set a good example; hence a need for ethical leadership.
Defining ethical leadership:
Moral compass: a well-developed vision of right and wrong, a clear sense of direction for improvement, and the ability to discern what can and must be done better.
They perceive things others might miss and draw a line between permissible and impermissible while pushing boundaries to raise the bar for themselves and others.
Courage: they know change is possible and act differently themselves, not simply following the crowd.
Metaphors and examples:
“They don’t flow downstream like dead fish; they swim against the current.” A head wind makes them strong, like a kite rising.
Real-world example: Obama’s response to financial-sector greed—“Ultimately, I’m responsible. The buck stops with me.”
Practical example: Lol Gonzalez (Florida consultancy director) chose to resign rather than fire a long-trusting employee during a recession; staff responded with renewed motivation, illustrating that ethical leadership can inspire commitment even when it seems irrational.
Takeaway question: Are you an ethical leader who models the environment you want to create for others to excel?
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Continuation on ethical leadership:
Ethics in leadership is not only about positions; it’s about shaping an environment where people can perform at their best.
The emphasis remains on whether leaders actively foster an environment that enables self and others to flourish.
Reflective prompt:
Are you capable of creating an environment that brings out the best in yourself and others?
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Title: Morals melt under pressure: authority and obedience.
Core issue: Organizations operate on power and authority; subordinates comply with management decisions.
Key question: How obedient are people when obedience would require them to harm others or violate ethics?
Workplace scenario setup: A nurse receives a call from a doctor requesting an immediate, high-dose medicine administration. The doctor will sign the order when he arrives. Usual dose would be 5 mg; maximum 10 mg; requested dose is 20 mg.
Relevance: This sets up the classic obedience-to-authority dilemma in a professional context.
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Milgram’s famous obedience study (1960s) context:
Purpose: To examine whether ordinary people share a common morality with war criminals or whether the situation itself drives harmful behavior.
Design (summary): A teacher and a student are paired; the teacher administers shocks for wrong answers; shocks increase by 15 volts with each wrong answer, up to 450 volts. The student’s responses are pre-recorded and not real shocks.
The setup includes a prerecorded cry for help, escalating to a scream at higher voltages; standardized prompts are used to encourage continuation if the teacher hesitates.
The teacher is led to believe the experiment assesses memory; in reality, the student is a confederate.
Findings (Milgram):
Average voltage at which participants continued was around 360 V; about two-thirds (≈ 66%) administered the highest shock of 450 V.
If the teacher asked to stop, the experimenter provided four prods to continue, becoming more insistent with each failure to proceed.
Even when warnings and screams occurred, many participants continued; most did not stop at the point of clear harm.
Interpretation by Milgram:
The essence of obedience lies in seeing oneself as an instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, thus not feeling fully responsible for actions.
“Befehl ist Befehl” was not uniquely German; ordinary people in certain circumstances can become complicit in reprehensible acts.
The study demonstrates that ordinary people can be agents in destructive processes under proper authority cues.
Implications for organizations:
Authority can be a powerful, potentially dangerous force in shaping behavior.
The appearance and context of authority (university affiliation, white lab coat, confident tone) amplify obedient behavior.
The same dynamics can exist in corporations and other organizations where leaders’ authority shapes subordinates’ actions.
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Ethical implications of Milgram’s findings:
The aura of authority can coerce people to follow unethical requests even when the outcomes are harmful.
It is morally important not to blind oneself to responsibility simply because a higher authority makes a request.
Additional observations:
Emotions: Participants showed observable signs of stress (protest, head-shaking, sweating, nervousness, tremor, etc.). Some even laughed nervously, signaling internal moral tension.
Broader takeaway:
A leadership role carries risk of encouraging obedience that overrides ethical judgment; thus, leaders should cultivate environments where questioning orders and moral reflection are supported.
There is a caution against using status and appearance to justify unethical requests.
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Responsibility in the face of orders:
Approximately a third of American professionals report that their manager sometimes asks them to do unethical or illegal things.
When a leader asks for something unethical, others may comply; doing so increases total shared responsibility, since compliance transfers some accountability to the requester.
Overcoming blind obedience:
It is not enough to resist only when an order is obviously harmful; one should question when there is potential harm or illegality.
Psychological signals of moral conflict:
Even in Milgram-like situations, participants often show signs of inner conflict (protests, nervous behaviors) indicating moral tension.
Small rays of hope:
Even when following orders, participants may pause and reflect; moral conscience can surface and influence eventual outcomes.
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Title: 19. Trapped in the role: clothes make the man (power dressing).
Core idea: Dress and appearance influence perceptions of authority and the credibility of advice.
Supporting evidence:
Stefanie Tzioti’s thesis: consultants appear more credible when wearing a suit and driving a matching car; the attire boosts perceived authority and the likelihood that clients will follow advice.
Milgram’s study and the white lab coat example: lab coats convey expertise and authority, increasing compliance with orders.
Dan Ariely’s experiments: provocatively dressed women trigger more short-term, rather than long-term, thinking in men; dress communicates social cues affecting cognition and decision-making.
Symbolism of clothing and role adoption:
Clothing signals expectations about one’s role; people may adopt behaviors consistent with the role and the attire.
Shakespeare reference: “This robe of mine does change my disposition.”
Scott Fraser’s children game study: when children wore a military uniform, aggression in game selection rose from 42% to 86%; revert to own clothing reduced aggression, illustrating rapid role-congruent shifts.
Positive and negative implications:
Clothing can help empathy and role-appropriate adaptation, but it can also cause role loss of self.
Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (detailed next) demonstrates the power of roles to override personal identity.
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Details of the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971):
Participants: 24 white, middle-class American male youths with no criminal history, randomly assigned to guards or prisoners.
Setup: Prison environment created in the basement of Stanford; guards wore khaki uniforms, whistles, batons, sunglasses; prisoners wore uniforms with identification numbers and shaved heads; strict rules with potential punishments.
Timeline: Planned for 14 days but halted after six days due to rapid deterioration.
Early phase: Rebellion on day two; guards responded with heavy-handed tactics (breaking doors with a fire extinguisher, removal of beds, isolation cells).
Escalation: Guards became increasingly sadistic; prisoners became submissive and depressed; some displayed psychosomatic symptoms; some prisoners and staff experienced emotional distress.
Outcome: The researchers were overwhelmed, and the situation felt real to all participants; the study was halted earlier than planned.
Attribution and interpretation:
The behavior of guards, prisoners, and researchers reflected internalization of assigned roles and norms associated with those roles.
Guards were influenced by imagery of authority; prisoners internalized identities as numbers, losing personal sense of self.
Zimbardo’s perspective: the roles were so powerful that even the researchers did not intervene adequately to stop harm.
Ethical and practical reflections:
The experiment illustrates how situational forces and role expectations can produce extreme behaviors even among 'ordinary' people.
It raises questions about the ethics of role assignment and the responsibility of researchers to safeguard participants from harm.
Practical lessons for leadership and management:
Role perception and norms strongly shape behavior; awareness of role-induced drift is essential for ethical leadership.
Consider how your own role and authority may shape others’ behavior; avoid creating or endorsing environments that degrade well-being.
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Continuation: The Stanford Prison Experiment (continued):
The study demonstrates that the internalization of roles can erode personal identity; participants treated others and themselves according to the role scripts, not their true dispositions.
The guards’ apparent sense of duty and the prisoners’ sense of defeat illustrate how quickly social roles can become self-reinforcing norms.
Implications for leadership and organizational culture:
Leaders should monitor and constrain role-enforcing dynamics that may encourage mistreatment or abusive practices.
The environment created by leadership (structure, norms, rules) can enable or deter harmful behaviors.
Final thought on role versus identity:
The question for individuals is less about what role they would play in abstract, and more about how norms, expectations, and structures influence their actions within a given role.
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Positive potential of roles:
Roles can elicit constructive behavior when designed with ethical aims in mind.
Salespeople can improve customer well-being, respect autonomy, and practice openness and honesty.
Politicians can serve society, balance competing interests, and earn public trust.
Managers can help others excel and listen to expectations, while remaining accountable.
Core takeaway:
The impact of roles depends on how they are perceived and enacted: prisoner versus guard; in practice, you might be a facilitator of positive outcomes rather than a suppressor of ethical norms.
Guiding question:
Will you choose to use your role to foster ethical behavior and the flourishing of others, or will you abdicate responsibility by following harmful scripts?
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Title: Power corrupts, but not always: hypocrisy and hypercrisy.
Common explanations for power and corruption:
High-status individuals are expected to maintain high moral standards and may fail more spectacularly when they do err.
Power can increase opportunistic behavior, with high-status individuals more likely to condemn others’ unethical behavior while excusing their own.
Lammers et al. experiments on power and moral judgments:
Setup: Participants assigned roles with high power (e.g., government minister) or low power (civil servant) and asked to judge various unethical acts (e.g., speeding, tax evasion, stealing a bicycle).
Findings:
Those with power condemned others’ unethical behavior more than those with less power when judging others (e.g., speeding: power = 6.3/9 vs low power = 7.3/9, where lower is more acceptable).
When evaluating their own behavior, powerful individuals judged it as more acceptable (average self-rating ≈ 7.6/9) than less powerful individuals (≈ 7.2/9).
Interpretation: The more power someone has, the more hypocritical they become—they demand higher standards from others while exempting themselves.
The cognitive schemata of power:
Power activates mental models about influence, leadership, and the right to judge others.
Hierarchical structures reinforce the belief that those at the top have license to enforce rules, which can distance them from accountability.
Privilege dynamics and the “servant leadership” counterpoint:
More influence typically leads to more privileges, which can drive further accumulation of power.
The danger is that power fosters a sense of exceptionality, detaching leaders from the moral responsibilities they hold to others.
Case example:
A financial institution chairman praised for his leadership later faced shareholder backlash after failed dividend promises and a controversial bonus request, illustrating how power and prestige can attract public scrutiny when outcomes diverge from expectations.
Practical takeaway:
To avoid hypocrisy, avoid assuming you stand above others; practice servant leadership and stay mindful of how power shapes your judgments of yourself and others.
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Title: Beeping bosses: fear, aggression and uncertainty.
Core idea: Power and legitimacy influence aggressive, punitive behavior in hierarchical settings.
Diekmann et al. traffic-behavior study:
Setup: Researchers stopped a middle-class car at a traffic light and, after the light turned green, the following car stayed stopped; they measured how quickly and whether the driver beeped or flashed headlights as a signal of aggression.
Findings:
Beeps occurred in about 75% of cases; headlights were used less frequently; average reaction time to beep was 4.2 seconds, with a wide range (1.4 to 17 seconds).
Beeping behavior was influenced by the class (status) of the blocked car: drivers of higher-status cars beeped faster (average around 2 seconds) than drivers of lower-status cars (around 5 seconds).
Implication: Higher social position correlates with greater aggression in traffic, suggesting similar patterns may exist in organizational settings: higher-status leaders may be quicker to exercise coercive power.
Additional factors:
Nathanael Fast and Serena Chen studied how leaders react to uncertainty about their own suitability.
They found uncertain managers tended to choose louder beeps (10–130 decibels) when faced with a subordinate giving a wrong answer, implying power plus uncertainty drives more aggressive reactions.
Practical caution:
Be cautious of “loud beeping bosses” who wield power aggressively under conditions of self-doubt or uncertainty.
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Summary of the same theme (Beeping bosses cont.):
The combination of high power and personal insecurity can magnify aggressive responses toward subordinates.
Implication for leadership: exercise restraint, provide constructive feedback, and foster an environment where uncertainty is openly discussed rather than punished with loud symbolic signals.
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Title: Fare dodgers and black sheep: when model behavior backfires.
Negative modeling effects:
A good example can backfire if it inadvertently teaches or signals a tolerance for rule-breaking.
Paul Webley and Claire Siviter dog-walker study:
Setup: Researchers observed dog-walking behavior in parks. They approached dog owners with a survey about dog-poop norms. They split participants into groups based on observed behavior (cleaners vs non-cleaners).
Findings:
Non-cleaners tended to view the law as too strict and underestimated the amount of dog poop.
The presence of a norm-violator within a group (rotten apple) increased the likelihood that others would violate the norm (free rider problem).
Conclusion: A single non-compliant individual can contaminate group norms, especially when others rationalize that “everyone else is doing it.”
Practical implication: In organizations, norms are contagious; non-compliance can spread if not countered.
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Continued exploration of model behavior effects:
Dieckmann et al. or related research on social influence; however, focus given is on how high-status violations influence group norms through social comparison.
Nath a lens on “beeping bosses” suggests that higher status combined with uncertainty can foster aggression, indicating that role-model effects are not universally positive.
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Francesca Gino and colleagues (rotten apple effect in groups):
Pittsburgh study (cheating within groups):
Setup: Groups of 8–14 students performed 20 tasks; after scoring, each participant could take $0.50 from an envelope for themselves, with the option to cheat by reporting higher scores.
Control condition: No cheating, actual scores reported; average correct answers were 7 per group, yielding $3.50 per participant.
Group with “cheater” present (assistant in white T-shirt who claimed to have answered all questions correctly and would take $10): other participants cheated more, reporting 15 correct answers on average (roughly double the control). They claimed higher scores to justify the cheat.
In-group versus rival effects:
If the assistant wore a Carnegie Mellon University logo (rival of Pitt), cheating dropped below even the control level, showing that the in-group identity amplified cheating contagion, while rival identity diminished it.
Takeaway: A “rotten apple” within one’s own group can infect the group’s behavior more strongly than a rival or outsider; the group’s norms and identity modulate the spread of immoral behavior.
Cialdini and colleagues (reference from Chapter 14):
Observing someone act ethically or unethically in a public space can influence others’ behavior; if a bystander acts according to norms, others are more likely to follow.
Conclusion for organizational ethics:
A single bad model within the group can taint group norms; labeling or isolating the “black sheep” from the group can sometimes mitigate contagion effects.
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Beeping bosses and model behavior in practice (continuation):
Rotten apples in groups can have a contagious effect; the presence of a rogue within the same group significantly increases the likelihood of others cheating or breaking norms.
The counterintuitive finding: outsiders (rivals) can sometimes cleanse group norms by highlighting differences and renewing commitment to internal standards.
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Final synthesis on beaming and beeping in group dynamics:
A single bad example can seed noncompliant behavior in a group if the example is perceived as belonging to the same group.
Conversely, a negative example from an outside group can reinforce commitment to one’s own norms and reduce transgression.
Takeaway for leadership and ethics:
Monitor and manage models of behavior within the group; misaligned in-group role models can undermine ethical standards.
Use boundary-setting labeling to prevent the spread of negative behaviors, and reinforce in-group norms with external standards when needed.