5.4: Dimensions of Ethics- The Individual Level

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the types of values that affect business ethics at the individual level.

Ethics is personal and unique to each individual. Ethical decision-making also involves other individuals, groups, organizations, and even nations—stakeholders and stockholders—as we later explain. Kenneth Goodpaster and Laura Nash characterized at least three dimensions or levels of ethics that help explain how individual and group values, norms, and behaviors of different stakeholders interact and respond with the aim of bringing orderly, fair, and just relationships with one another in transactions. This approach is illustrated in Exhibit 5.2.

Exhibit 5.2 A Framework for Classifying Levels of Ethical Analysis Source: Adapted from Matthews, John B., Goodpaster, Kenneth E., and Laura L. Nash. (1985). Policies and persons: A casebook in business ethics, 509. New York: McGraw- Hill.

Ethical principles generally are codified into laws and regulations when there is societal consensus about such wrongdoing, such as laws against drunk driving, robbery, and murder. These laws, and sometimes unwritten societal norms and values, shape the local environment within which individuals act and conduct business. At the individual level, a person’s values and beliefs are influenced by family, community, peers and friends, local and national culture, society, religious—or other types of—communities, and geographic environment. It is important to look at individual values and ethical principles since these influence an individual’s decisions and actions, whether decisions to act or the failure to act against wrongdoing by others. In organizations, an individual’s ethical stance may be affected by peers, subordinates, and supervisors, as well as by the organizational culture. Organizational culture often profoundly influences individual choices and can support and encourage ethical actions or promote unethical and socially irresponsible behavior.

Ethics and Values: Terminal and Instrumental Values

Of the values that make up an organization’s culture and an individual’s motivations, ethical values are now considered among the most important. For instance, when Google took its company public in 2004, its prospectus included an unusual corporate goal: “Don’t be evil.” That can be a challenge when you’re a multibillion-dollar corporation operating around the world, with investors expecting you to produce a profit. Google’s operations in the United States and overseas have generated controversy and debate about how well it achieves its stated goal. There is a continuing need to integrate ethical values in corporations. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative found 22 percent of global workers reported pressure to compromise their standards (ECI Connects, 2016). Top corporate managers are under scrutiny from the public as never before, and even small companies are finding a need to put more emphasis on ethics to restore trust among their customers and the community.

Exhibit 5.3 Elon Musk Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, pictured here at a TedX conference, is widely admired for his CSR approaches at his companies. Generally, the adoption of electric vehicles, which help reduce pollutants, is viewed as a positive outcome. Musk came under scrutiny regarding comments about having secured financing to take Tesla private that raise compliance issues. (Credit: Steve Jurvetson/ flickr/ Attribution- 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0))

Values can be powerful and motivating guides for individual, group, and organizational behavior. At the individual level, however, a recurring issue individuals seem to have with acting ethically is that many people do not consciously know or choose their values. We often act first and think or rationalize later. Secondly, the methods and ways we act to reach our goals and objectives are also not always deliberately chosen. Consequently, we often let the “ends justify the means” and/or “the means justify the ends” in our decisions and actions. Ethical dilemmas (i.e., situations and predicaments in which there is not an optimal or desired choice to be made between two options, neither of which solves an issue or delivers an ethical opportunity) often originate and occur from an unawareness of how to sort out and think through potential consequences of our actions or inaction. Becoming aware and conscious of our values is a first step toward being able to act ethically and responsibly to prevent or lessen harm to ourselves or others.

Toward this end, it is helpful to understand values categorized as terminal and instrumental. Terminal values are desired goals, objectives, or end states that individuals wish to pursue. Instrumental values are preferred means of behavior used to obtain those goals. Examples of terminal values—at a higher level—are freedom, security, pleasure, social recognition, friendship, accomplishment, comfort, adventure, equality, wisdom, and happiness (Rokeach, 1973). Instrumental values include being helpful, honest, courageous, independent, polite, responsible, capable, ambitious, loving, self-contained, and forgiving (Rokeach, 1973).

Identifying and separating terminal from instrumental values in any given situation can assist individuals, groups, and work units in distinguishing between the “ends (goals) from the means (methods to reach the goals)” and vice versa in making decisions, thereby helping us choose more ethical options—or at least less unethical ones—in situations. For example, a sales manager aims to motivate his sales force to achieve individual sales performance levels at a 17% increase over current levels by the end of the calendar quarter. According to the manager, the means of doing so are, “Go for it. Use your imagination and fortitude. Just make sure each of you reaches or exceeds that goal.” In this case, the terminal value is high achievement to the point of being overly ambitious to reach an aggressive financial goal. The instrumental value can also be described as aggressive achievement. Both the terminal and instrumental values in this scenario could very likely create undue pressure and even anxiety for some sales force members. The ethical logic underlying this example is to let the “end justify the means.” The scenario also raises the question of whether or not individuals in the sales force would choose the values underlying the manager's instruction if each member identified and reflected on those values.

If the end (terminal) value creates undue pressures and is unrealistic and unattainable, then the means (instrumental) value would likely create tension and unethical behavior. In some ways, this example mirrors what recently happened at Wells Fargo & Company—an American international banking and financial services holding company headquartered in San Francisco. High-pressure and unrealistic sales goals were adopted and implemented from the top down in that organization. A result was that sales force members lied, pressured, and misled loyal customers to buy bogus financial products to meet unrealistic sales goals. Such actions, when discovered, led to and revealed illegal and unethical actions from not only the sales professionals but also officers at the top of that organization. Ultimately, the CEO was pressured to resign, 5,300 employees were fired, and several lawsuits ensued (Comrie, 2017).

The Wells Fargo fiasco yields many lessons. From an individual ethical perspective, one insight is to be aware of the underlying values of organizational and other job- and task-related directives issued. Another is to discover your own values and ethical principles that can guide you in work, study, and personal situations so that someone else’s problems may not have to become yours. A helpful assessment for discovering your values is the PVA (Personal Values Assessment) found at https://www.valuescentre.com/pva.

Carucci found that “five ways organizations needlessly provoke good people to make unethical choices” are the following:

1. People feel psychologically unsafe to speak up.
2. Excessive pressure to reach unrealistic performance targets compromises people’s choices.
3. When individuals face conflicting goals, they feel a sense of unfairness and compromise their reasoning.
4. Only talking about ethics when there is a scandal.
5. When there is no positive example available, individuals react instead of choosing ethical decisions. Familiarizing yourself with ethical principles in the following section is another way of helping you think through complicated situations to make conscious, values-based decisions to do “the right thing" (Carucci, 2016).

Concept Check

1. What are terminal and instrumental values?
2. What are ways organizations can employ values to induce people to make ethical choices?