[Professor Robert Prentice] When we are young, we naturally wish to please our parents,
our teachers, our ministers and rabbis.
Even as adults, we wish to please authority figures, such as our boss at work.
However, if obedience to authority causes us to ignore our own ethical standards,
big trouble can result.
When people in organizations make decisions, they are often much more concerned about the
acceptability of the decision to the people to whom they are accountable than they are
about the content of the decision itself.
Studies show that CFOs are more likely to illicitly manage earnings when it profits
their CEOs than when it profits themselves.
In other words, they act unethically primarily to please their bosses, not to put money in
their own pockets.
[Dana] I worked at CVS Pharmacy and every week we would have different sales, and a
lot of times regular customers… they would find these sales and use manufacturer's coupons.
So basically they were getting more money back than they were paying.
And even though it was technically right, it was harming our store, so my manager didn’t
like that.
My manager just told me to say that we were sold out of them so that the customer couldn’t
buy any more.
I kind of just did it because it was something small and my boss told me to.
[James] There was a time when we ran out of some really bold coffee and my manger was
like, "just give him the light one.
Like, they’re not going to know, coffee is coffee."
I kind of felt bad because it wasn’t what they wanted and it wasn’t what they were
paying for but I was like, "Okay well if the manager says yes then...
Here’s the bold coffee!"
Private e-mails sent by stock analysts during the dot.com boom often indicated that the
analysts wished they had the courage to stand up to their superiors and "call them like
they saw them."
But usually these analysts failed to do so.
Instead, they continued to knuckle under to supervisory pressure to hype questionable
stocks so that their firms could gain investment banking business.
Most of us simply do not realize how much our desire to please superiors and our consequent
tendency to defer to authority will cloud our ethical judgement when the time comes
to make decisions.
[Lauren] If it’s an authority figure, like a boss, that you really like or you really
need to like you that...
I have a tendency to commit to something without thinking about what else I have.
So if a boss asks me to stay late, I may say, “Yes, of course I can because I want to
do this project right.
I want to make sure you like it, it’s ready when you want it to be” without thinking
about previous engagements I’ve made to other people and disappointing other people
in my life or attending to my own needs, which can kind of conflict with what I actually
need to do outside of my job.
A study of nurses by Hofling and Brotzman found that when members of one group of nurses
were asked whether they would follow a physician's instructions to give a patient an injection
of an obviously excessive dose of a drug that was not even on the hospital's approved list,
almost all the nurses said that they would not do so.
But when a second group of nurses were actually given such instructions, virtually every one
of them was prepared to do so before they were stopped by the experimenters.
More concerning than people consciously acting unethically in order to stay in their boss's
good graces is the fact that sometimes employees are so intent upon pleasing their superiors
that they do not even notice the ethical aspects of a decision.
Egil "Bud" Krogh, who became infamous as head of the "Plumbers Unit" operating out of President
Nixon's White House, was instructed to oversee a break-in at the office of the psychiatrist
of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, embarrassing
the Nixon Administration.
Krogh later explained that he was so intent upon pleasing his superiors who were, after
all, among the most powerful people in the world, that he never even activated his own
ethical sense to judge the morality of what he was trying to accomplish.
He did not see the ethical dimensions of his situation until it was too late.
Bud Krogh's experience should be a warning to us all.
While it is usually a fine thing for us to please our supervisors, we must keep a lookout
for ethical issues and we must never defer so completely to our bosses that we substitute
their orders for our own ethical standards.
[Charity] I'm homosexual, I'm gay, and my mom asked me when I was younger, to go and,
I don’t know, talk to my pastor about it... basically to see what was wrong with me.
After a while I told her, “I personally am not okay with this because
I’m not hurting anyone.”
Knowing they were going to be angry about it instead of just lying about it -- that was hard.
But in the long run I think it helped me out because it helped me be a prouder person and
it did help me come to the point to where it feels good to be truthful.
[Taylor] I think just listening to that inner voice is key.
The sort of environment that would help me be able to speak up is one where you're
treated as an equal, at least on a personal level.
Remember that there’s really big consequences to acting unethically sometimes and just one
time can make… can destroy a program, can destroy a person and what they’ve worked
for their entire life.
I think if you keep those ideas in mind, it’ll be easier for you to say,
“That’s not ethical and I’m not going to do that.”