Goal setting is often a subject of discussion about behavioral ethics and internal programs.  We’ve seen in recent cases such as at Wells Fargo and Volkswagen how cheating and lying become the norm when performance goals are not reasonably achievable.  Recent evidence in a paper by Niki den Nieuwenboer, João da Cunha, and ES collaborator Linda Treviño shows the internal dynamics and processes that lead directly to cheating behaviors.  

The researchers, one of which was embedded inside the company, observed managers and sales staff over 15 months at a large (10,000 employees) telecommunications company.  The company had established goals for its desk sales teams designed to motivate productivity, including a target for sales as well as sales-related work, such as making cold calls to customers, and gathering information about potential customers, among other planning activities.

Featured Culture and Business Ethics Expert: Marshall Schminke, BB&T Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Central Florida

What are your main areas of research around business ethics?

I focus on the idea that ethics don’t happen in isolation.  They emerge from a complicated mix of individual and situational factors.  My research explores this messy stew and how it drives ethical behavior.  More specifically, I study the impact of organizational structure and culture on individual ethics, such as trying to understand climates that support or resist ethical decision making, abusive supervision, moral emotions, and ethical efficacy.  My work also examines how ethical and unethical action drifts through organizations.  I study how factors like trust and fairness—which provide the foundation for organizational ethics—“trickle down” the organization from managers to supervisors to line employees. Understanding these patterns helps to explain why relatively small changes in ethical or unethical activity may lead to profound, organization-wide effects.

Ethical culture is the linchpin to running an ethical organization. Yet, while everyone agrees that culture is a vital aspect of any successful organization there is no consensus on how to analyze and measure it. At Ethical Systems, we are working with the top researchers on organizational culture and have developed assessment tools that companies can use. Our new Ethical Systems Culture Measurement site provides a suite of modules designed to measure various elements of organizational culture.