#BlueBloods: Fictive Kinship, and Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior in Police Organizations

Abstract

We report an internet-based ethnographic study which examines how unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)–in this case, violence–emerges as an expression of a profession’s moral identity. We specifically examine the professional culture of law enforcement officers in the United States. We argue that fictive kinship metaphors (the use of family language between unrelated people) facilitate increased moral identity overlap within the organization. Using an ethnographic approach that includes publicly available police-published documents, we find that fictive kinship metaphors can alleviate–even entirely remove–moral tensions one may feel when committing unethical pro-organizational acts. Indeed, unethical pro-organizational behavior can be purely morally motivated. Previous discussions of organizational ethics have highlighted the importance of morality in preventing unethical behavior. However, we show that a strong moral identity that is widely shared in a profession can have detrimental consequences for members of the public and other organizational stakeholders