Ethical Champions and the Ethics of Team Decisions

It can be difficult for one individual in an organization to serve as an ethical champion. Businesses may primarily focus on profit which can leave ethnical decision-making as a lower priority. Recent research in the Journal of Applied Psychology explored how ethnical champions can impact the ethics of team decisions with the use of two experiments.

In the first experiment, the researchers first explored the role of two emotions—anger and sympathy. They hypothesized that these two emotions may encourage ethical champions to voice their opinions and motivate team members to hear them out. The researchers tested whether using these emotions emphasized team ethical awareness (i.e., the team’s acknowledgment of ethical issues). The researchers found that both emotions—anger and sympathy—increased ethical awareness which subsequently increased the ethicality of team decisions. Despite both emotions positively impacting ethical awareness, there was no difference in ethical awareness between ethical champions who used anger and those who used sympathy. However, those who expressed anger were disliked more than those who expressed sympathy.

In the second experiment, the researchers examined how two different frames relate to ethical decision making. The first, the ethical frame of decision making, refers to using language that makes ethics salient. The second, the business frame, emphasizes the business benefits of an ethical decision. Ethical champions who used the ethical frame had more team ethical awareness, which led to a decrease in moral disengagement (i.e., distancing one’s self from a moral dilemma). When an ethical champion used a business frame, the team perceived more business utility of the ethical idea. This increased the ethicality of team decisions. This frame also led to decreased moral disengagement because there were no conflicting business priorities.

Chen, A., Treviño, L. K., & Humphrey, S. E. (2019). Ethical champions, emotions, framing, and team ethical decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000437