EDO 820 Module 3 Power and Moral Disengagement Example

Fourteen Years of Yes: Power, Moral Disengagement and the Statements a Nonprofit Leader Used to Justify Himself

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Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDO 820: Ethical Issues in Leading Organizations

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Fourteen Years of Yes: Power, Moral Disengagement and the Statements a Nonprofit Leader Used to Justify Himself

Module 2 explained the moments of a single decision at Kinloch Family Services, the invented Ohio nonprofit studied in this course. This paper steps back to ask how fourteen years in power shaped the leader who made it, and how he justified the act to himself and others. As described earlier in the course, the chief executive moved $1.9 million from a restricted youth housing grant into payroll, recorded it as a loan and told the funder nothing. Kinloch, its people and every figure are fictional.

How the Power Grew

What Power Does to Its Holders

Kipnis (1972) studied how holding power affects the powerholder. In laboratory experiments, participants acted as managers supervising workers; some were given considerable power, such as the ability to give raises, deduct pay, transfer or fire, while others had little. Managers with more power made more attempts to influence their workers, attributed workers' good performance to their own control rather than to the workers' motivation, evaluated workers less favorably and expressed a preference for more social distance from them. Kipnis concluded that control of resources changes how powerholders see the people below them, making them more likely to see those people as objects of influence.

The pattern appears at Kinloch. When the youth housing program director objected to the transfer, the chief executive described her to the board as well-meaning but unfamiliar with finance, and did not consult her again. Staff who had disagreed with him in the past reported that their views were increasingly treated as obstacles rather than information.

The Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement

Bandura (1999) explained how people who hold moral standards can nonetheless act against them without the self-condemnation that would normally restrain them. He described mechanisms that disengage moral self-sanctions. Some reconstrue the conduct itself: moral justification, which portrays harmful conduct as serving a worthy purpose; euphemistic labeling, which uses sanitized language; and advantageous comparison, which contrasts the conduct with worse acts. Some obscure responsibility: displacement of responsibility onto authorities and diffusion of responsibility across a group. Some disregard or distort the consequences. And some focus on the victims: dehumanization and attribution of blame to those harmed or to circumstances.

The table shows that the chief executive did not abandon his moral standards. He kept them and used disengagement to place his act outside their reach. That is what made him so confident before the board.

Disengagement and Behavior

Moore et al. (2012) developed a short measure of the propensity to morally disengage and tested whether it predicted unethical conduct in organizations. Across several studies, people with a higher propensity to disengage were more likely to report unethical decisions and behaviors, and in workplace samples their coworkers and supervisors also reported more unethical behavior by them. The propensity predicted unethical conduct beyond other individual differences. The research suggests that disengagement is not only a story people tell after the fact but a tendency that shapes what they do.

For Kinloch, the implication is uncomfortable. The chief executive's ease in justifying the transfer may not have been unique to the crisis. Board members later recalled earlier occasions when he described cutting a program's services as reorganizing, or explained a missed reporting deadline by blaming the funder's system. These smaller episodes now look like early signs.

Disengagement Is Contagious

Moral disengagement did not stay with the chief executive. The finance director, asked to record a loan, adopted his language in her own memo to the auditors. Senior team members repeated his comparison with agencies that had laid off staff. Bandura's mechanisms work socially as well as individually: a leader who frames an act in disengaging terms supplies followers with the words they need to accept it. That spread helps explain why the act met so little resistance inside Kinloch and why the board heard it described, at first, as prudent cash management.

Where the Process Could Have Been Interrupted

Three points stand out. First, the board's habit of approval could have been interrupted by regular executive sessions without the chief executive, in which members discussed his proposals and performance among themselves. Second, the eliminated deputy role, or an empowered finance committee chair, could have provided a senior person able to question him in real time. Third, the program director's objection could have triggered a required review: an organization can make it a rule that any objection by a senior staff member to the use of restricted funds goes to the board's finance committee before action.

Conclusion

The chief executive's power grew through a series of reasonable changes that together removed every check on his judgment. Kipnis shows how such power changes how leaders see others, Bandura shows how a leader can act against his own standards without feeling that he has, and Moore and colleagues show that this tendency predicts behavior. The lesson for governance is that checks must be built while a leader is succeeding, because that is when they are being lost.

References

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

Kipnis, D. (1972). Does power corrupt? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(1), 33-41. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033390

Moore, C., Detert, J. R., Treviño, L. K., Baker, V. L., & Mayer, D. M. (2012). Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior. Personnel Psychology, 65(1), 1-48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01237.x