2 Building Ethics at the Individual Level
• Unethical behavior as any actions that violate accepted societal norms.
• Why should companies attempt to understand individual ethics to reduce unethical
behavior?
Moral Awareness
• Moral awareness refers to the ability of an individual to understand the ethicality of a
situation or behavior.
• Another important factor contributing to moral attentiveness referring to the ability of
individuals to access and interpret the moral content of information and stimuli they are
presented with.
Moral Judgment
• Moral judgment therefore refers to the process by which someone reasons about how
to deal with an ethical situation.
• To properly judge the morality of any situation, employees need to be rational and
logical. Because of our limitations, we often fall prey to biases that result in unethical
behaviors.
• Types of biases
o Implicit prejudice occurs when people rely on unconscious biases and
prejudice when people judge others.
o In-group favoritism occurs because people tend to favor those individuals who
share similar characteristics to their own, such as being from the same school,
social class, or religion.
orders that came from their managers or CEO.
o Employees are also likely to succumb to the conformity bias whereby the
employee has the “tendency of imitating or accepting the values of others” as a
way to justify one’s actions.
o Incrementalism whereby employees engage in minor unethical behaviors that
eventually lead to major ethical infractions.
Moral Intention and Behaviors
• Moral intention and behaviors refer to the employees’ choices and decisions when
confronting moral situations.
• Jones’ Ethical Decision-Making Aspects
o How do individuals examine ethical situations and decide how to act?
According to Jones, people evaluate the moral intensity of any situation and
behave accordingly. If they perceive that the situation has high moral intensity,
they are more likely to have intentions or to behave ethically.
o According to Jones, the moral intensity of is dependent on six elements. These
elements include:
1. magnitude of consequences—refers to the degree of harm that the victims of
an unethical choice will have to endure;
• Moral disengagement refers to this deactivation process where, when faced with
potential behavior counter to their own personal standards, a person may choose to
deactivate the standard and still engage in the behavior.
o Moral justification occurs when individuals justify certain actions to make
them seem more morally acceptable.
o Euphemistic labeling refers to the use of morally neutral language to make
something seem less immoral.
o Advantageous comparison occurs when someone compares a worse behavior
with another behavior and rationalizes the behavior on that basis.
o Displacement of responsibility occurs when the perpetrator of an unethical