Moral Disengagement and Organizations

Abstract

One does not need to look extensively to find examples of organizations behaving unethically in today’s society. With the passage of whistleblower laws and the increased attention to ethical behavior in recent years, many businesses focus on training in order to reduce unwanted behavior. Despite organizations transitioning to more engaging, substantial ethical training programs for their employees, unethical behavior still remains. Moral disengagement, in part, could be the reason. Moral disengagement is when an individual deliberately deactivates their moral self-regulations, allowing the individual to commit unethical acts without shame or guilt. Moral disengagement has eight mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, distortion of the consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame. Each of these mechanisms offers insight into why and how moral disengagement operates within individuals. Because an individual’s reasoning can fall into either a single mechanism or a combination of them, measurement tools commonly place each mechanism as a dimension of moral disengagement. Doing so allows the researcher to examine the construct and its relationships more accurately. The research investigating unethical behavior in organizations is substantial. However, moral disengagement is an antecedent to unethical behavior and not necessarily an unethical act itself. Previous research on moral disengagement often lies within psychology, military science, sociology, and other nonbusiness fields. With the depths of moral disengagement in the workplace still unexplored, scholars have opportunities to contribute research that can help organizations understand moral disengagement, improve ethical training, and potentially curtail employees’ unethical behavior.