Regan on Changing Organizational Culture and Ethics So They Work Together

Posted by Alan Childress

Milton Regan, Jr. (Georgetown), below left, has posted to SSRN Law & Soc’y:  The Legal Profession his article, “Moral Intuitions and Organizational Culture,” also in 51 St. Louis U. L.J. 941 (2007).  His abstract begins:

    Many efforts to understand and respondto a succession of corporate scandals over the last few years haveunderscored the importance of organizational culture in shaping thebehavior of individuals. This focus reflects appreciation that even ifan organization has adopted elaborate rules and policies designed toensure legal compliance and ethical behavior, those pronouncements willbe ineffective if other norms and incentives promote contrary conduct.

    Respondingto the call for creating and sustaining an ethical culture inorganizations requires appreciating the subtle ways in which variouscharacteristics of an organization may work in tandem or atcross-purposes in shaping behavior. The idea is to identify theinfluences likely to be most important, analyze how people are apt torespond to them, and revise them if necessary so that they create theright kinds of incentives when individuals are deciding how to act.

    Thiscan be a tall order even if we assume that most behavior is the resultof a deliberative process that weighs multiple risks and rewards. It‘seven more daunting if we accept the notion that conscious deliberationtypically plays but a minor role in shaping behavior. A focus on whattwo scholars describe as “the unbearable automaticity of being” positsthat most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by consciousintentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes outside ofconscious awareness.

    In this article, I discuss a particularstrand of research that is rooted in the study of non-conscious mentalprocesses, and consider its implications for ethics and culture in theorganizational setting. This is work on the process that we use toidentify and respond to situations that raise what we think of asdistinctly moral questions.

The remainder of the abstract appears after the jump.

The abstract continues:

A growing body of research suggests thata large portion of this process involves automatic non-consciouscognitive and emotional reactions rather than conscious deliberation.One way to think of these reactions is that they reflect reliance onmoral intuitions. When such intuitions arise, we don‘t engage in moralreasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion. Instead, we do so inorder to justify a conclusion that we‘ve already reached. In otherwords, moral conclusions precede, rather than follow, moral reasoning.

Ifthis research accurately captures much of our moral experience, whatdoes it suggest about what’s necessary to foster an ethicalorganizational culture? At first blush, the implications seemunsettling. The non-conscious realm is commonly associated withirrational and arbitrary impulses, and morality often is characterizedas the hard-won achievement of reason over these unruly forces. If mostof our moral judgments are the product of non-conscious processes, howcan we hope to understand, much less influence, our moral responses?Are moral reactions fundamentally inscrutable and beyond appeals toreason? If reason has no persuasive force, does appreciation of thenon-conscious source of our moral judgments suggest that any effort topromote ethical conduct must rest on a crude behaviorism thatmanipulates penalties and rewards?

I believe thatacknowledging the prominent role of non-conscious processes in shapingmoral responses need not inevitably lead either to fatalism orSkinnerian behaviorism. Research has begun to shed light on how theseprocesses operate. Related work has suggested how our moral responsesmay be rooted in human evolution. This perspective focuses on the waysin which our capacity for moral judgment is embedded in physical andmental processes that have provided an adaptive advantage in humanevolution. These bodies of research contribute to a richer portrait ofhuman cognition and behavior that can be valuable in thinking about howto promote ethical awareness and conduct.

As Owen Flanagan hasput it, “seeing clearly the kinds of persons we are is a necessarycondition for any productive ethical reflection.” If there were such athing as a normative theory of human movement, it would be futile if itexhorted us to fly. Efforts to create an organizational culture thatencouraged people to fly would be doomed as well. In thinking aboutethics, we need to have a sense of what lies between simplyaccommodating what we tend to do and demanding that we fly. My hope isthat this article takes a small step in that direction.