Ethics Readings and Resources

It is encouraging to see an increased focus on mental health in the workplace. It is also important to remember that leaders' concern for people needs to be authentic and based on respect for the dignity of each person:

"If your concern is purely utilitarian—and you feign concern to help ensure performance levels don’t slip, people will see right through it. Your regard for the mental health of your team must be born from a genuine concern for them as human beings, and the delight they experience in contributing to your organization. Treat performance results as an outcome of that kind of leadership. Treating people as only a means to an end is a sure fire way to damage their mental health and your team’s performance."

To build on the gains made in recent years, ethics training will have to accomplish several goals. First, ethics training needs to focus on unleashing participants’ intrinsic motivation to be ethical, rather than rely on solely on a compliance mentality that justifies ethical behavior through rewards and punishment. When people are intrinsically motivated they persevere through difficult times and are less likely to take short cuts. By making ethics something that leaders want to do and need to do in order to succeed, we can increase commitment to ethics in organizations and reduce the likelihood of ethical lapses which can be more likely to occur if our field of vision is narrowed by external incentives.

To make their behavior contagious, ethical leaders need to harness the power of "elevation."
Moral rules and codes are important but moral inspiration comes from people's ethical behaviour. When we see or hear about acts of kindness, we feel elevation - an emotion that has the power to spread leading to upward ethical spirals. Let’s share positive stories that exemplify our values because they are more likely to motivate us all to do better.

Can people really miss a gorilla right in front of their eyes? You bet your sweet bananas they can! This video provides a tongue-in-cheek exploration of inattentional blindness with Professor Dan Simons and the often ignored Invisible Gorilla himself.

Simons is a faculty member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois and the Human Perception and Performance group of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

For the slopes are slippery... Getting away with minor infractions makes it easier for people to justify bigger, more serious ethical violations. Addressing even the smallest ethical transgression is important. So is checking our own behaviour and rationalisations. A new study finds that getting away with minor infractions ends up making it easier for people to justify bigger, more serious ethical violations. Over time, small ethical transgressions–like stealing pens from work–can put employees on the “slippery slope” of increasingly bad behavior.

A frequent issue around ethics is whether it is grey, black and white or somewhere in between. Is it all relative - when in Rome do we do as the Romans do? Or do we have universal ethical values?  An interesting perspective on the objectivity of morality focuses on harm, arguing that  "it is objectively clear that where there is intentional harm there is immorality".  What do you think?

Morality is of course serious but this fun exercise provides an opportunity to think and make judgements that reveal interesting insights about our moral framework, influence of distance and relatedness, how we perceive acts and omissions, magnitude of consequences and more. It is not a morality test just an opportunity to better understand what we may consider important in our moral thinking. Enjoy!

Because ethics is about how to live with each other and all of us can be leaders for good.

Bias is ubiquitous, but we can take steps to overcome it if we understand where it comes from.

The 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) was released by Transparency International this week. CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the world by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. Australia got its worse ever score with 73 points and fell from seventh in the world in 2012 to 18th in 2021.

Global Ranking (CPI) - Transparency International Australia