Turning a spotlight on behavioral blind spots

Ann Tenbrunsel is less interested in famous criminals than in the bystanders who look the other way when someone like scorned financier Bernie Madoff orchestrates the largest PONZI scheme in history.

“Madoff was a bad guy,” said the David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics and chair of the Department of Management & Organization at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “But it took a lot of people turning a blind eye to allow it to happen. If no one turned a blind eye, Madoff would have been stopped dead in his tracks.”

Madoff is indeed a famously bad guy, and it would be challenging to find someone to openly defend him for defrauding thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Yet not every ethical dilemma is so unequivocal, and given the length of Madoff’s scheme — at least 17 years — it must not have seemed so clear cut to at least a few of the people around him either.

Ann E. Tenbrunsel

“We have illusions that we’re more ethical than we are,” said Tenbrunsel, who has studied behavioral ethics and decision making since before it was a recognized field of research. “We predict we’re going to behave ethically and then when we don’t, due to a variety of forces, we recall our behavior as being better than it was, so we never really learn.”

Tenbrunsel is fascinated by how individuals respond to the variety of forces that cause ethical dilemmas. She began examining these forces long before entering academia when she worked as an industrial engineer for S.C. Johnson & Son and as a consultant at ZS Associates, focusing on improving the workforce through processes. After a while, she realized she preferred people to processes and pursued a Ph.D. at Northwestern University where she focused on optimal decision making and why people make suboptimal choices.

“I began by studying why people deviate from rationality, but then changed the question to, why do people deviate from their own morality?”

This question has been at the crux of Tenbrunsel’s research ever since and has helped shape the field of behavioral ethics — a field that took time to receive recognition despite its relevance across industries. It wasn’t long ago that even business schools were unable to see how teaching business ethics might benefit students.

“When scandals like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco hit, it was suddenly like, ‘Where are our ethics professors?’” said Tenbrunsel. “Those weren’t the first scandals, but a lot of people involved in those were MBA students from top schools and that got a lot of press.”

In 2011, Tenbrunsel, with co-author Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School, published Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It. They examined well-known scandals including Enron and the Challenger space shuttle disaster as well as corruption across certain industries such as tobacco, demonstrating how intrapersonal concerns and interpersonal relationships and systems within organizations contribute to people deviating from their ethical values without realizing it.

“Organizations contribute to unethical behavior by requiring employees meet unrealistic deadlines, causing them to cut corners,” she explained. Meanwhile, someone focused on meeting performance expectations and being a “good” employee might fail to recognize their own moral values slipping away in the process.

Since the publication of “Blind Spots,” the field has only expanded as concerns regarding public trust and stories of whistleblowers have dominated headlines in recent years.

“We have a crisis of trust because of unethical behavior,” said Tenbrunsel, citing the rising rate at which employees report observing misconduct and that nearly half of large public firms are intentionally violating accounting rules. In her most recent paper, “Bridging the Chasm between Intentions and Behaviors: Developing and Testing a Construal Level Theory of Internal Whistle-Blowing,” forthcoming in Organization Science with co-authors Abhijeet Vadera and Kristina A. Diekmann, she investigates why someone might, or might not, act on their intentions to whistle blow.

The paper explores the relationship between whistleblowing intentions and behaviors and whether the systems within organizations, such as formal codes of conduct and training, promote or discourage whistleblowing intentions. In other words, will an employee who believes they would speak out when faced with an ethical dilemma actually do so when the moment arises? Further, what organizational systems might encourage their behavior?

The authors found that communication from top management is impactful when done at the intention stage, as in before an employee has encountered an ethical dilemma. However, these communications matter significantly less when one is actually presented with an ethical dilemma. Instead, accountability systems are more important. Will they be retaliated against for speaking out? Will speaking out lead to any meaningful consequences? Having answers to these and similar questions will have a greater impact on behavior.

“By separating intentions and behaviors and recognizing the temporal nature of the ethical decision-making process, the research shows that different systems are more impactful at different times,” said Tenbrunsel.  “This is important because rather than continuously bombard employees with communications and policies, which may lead employees to become desensitized to them, these results suggest that taking a temporal lens may improve their effectiveness and, importantly,  increase the frequency of whistle-blowing.”

For example, consider tax season, a time when accounting firms may be susceptible to unethical behavior due to deadline pressure. “Before tax season, maybe firms hit harder on the top management communication systems. But then, once tax season is underway, they emphasize that they will not retaliate against whistleblowers and that perpetrators will be punished,” she said.

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The practical implications of behavioral ethics have been apparent long before academia embraced the field. Recently, Tenbrunsel explored one of the most demonstrable examples of ethical failings in human history: the Holocaust. As faculty for the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), she led 14 graduate business students and early career professionals on a two-week study of key historical sites from Nazi Germany and Poland.

“I wanted to take my research to the next meaningful step, which is working with motivated individuals at the start of their careers to prepare them for the ethical dilemmas that they are going to face,” she said. “For example, we looked at the businesses involved in creating the rail stations to transport the Jews [to concentration and death camps] or those that built and sold the crematoriums and then explored how these same forces could still be at play today. What role does every single person play?”

The fellowship also highlighted how seemingly innocuous behavior such as using language euphemisms, a common practice in business settings, still requires examination. “For example, the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish Question,’ which was discussed at the Wannsee Conference, was a language euphemism that disguised its true intent — the Nazi’s program for murdering millions of Jews,” Tenbrunsel said. “I try to get people to see how these behaviors actually are replicated in various forms and various intensities in their own lives.”

Though studying behavioral ethics can be disheartening, to say the least, Tenbrunsel also sees it as an avenue for examining and ultimately improving human responses to the sometimes nefarious forces at work around us. In fact, some of our other interpersonal hardwiring can be utilized to help.

“We end the study with what we call “This I will implement,” which is a statement kind of like a New Year’s resolution where each student shares three things they’ll do moving forward to improve their ethical behavior,” she said. “When you make a commitment, you’re going to feel even more of a need to stick to it because we don’t ever want to look inconsistent.”

Ann E. Tenbrunsel is the David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics in the College of Business Administration at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests focus on the psychology of ethical decision making, examining why employees, leaders and students behave unethically, despite their best intentions to behave to the contrary. She teaches at the executive, MBA and undergraduate levels.