EDP 820 Module 4 Organizational Ethics Example

Apples, Cases and Barrels: Assessing the Ethics of a Psychology Department

Student Name

Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDP 820: Ethics and Professional Standards in Psychology

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Apples, Cases and Barrels: Assessing the Ethics of a Psychology Department

After the concerns about Dr. Lang's lab reached the university's research integrity office, the chair of the composite psychology department asked Ruth to lead a broader review: was the lab case an isolated problem or a sign of something in the department? Ruth formed a small team, surveyed faculty, staff and students about the department's ethical climate and interviewed twenty people. The department, its chair and its members are fictional. This paper presents the analysis.

Ethical Climate

Victor and Cullen (1988) used ethical work climate to mean what people in an organization jointly believe about right conduct and about how moral questions are settled there. Drawing on ethical theory, they proposed climate types based on the criterion people use, self-interest, benevolence or principle, and the locus of analysis, individual, local or cosmopolitan. Empirically, they identified several climate types, including instrumental, where people pursue self-interest; caring, where concern for others guides decisions; rules, where organizational rules guide; law and code, where professional and legal codes guide; and independence, where personal moral convictions guide. Organizations can contain different climates in different units.

What Makes Ethics Programs Work

Treviño et al. (1999) surveyed employees in six large companies about their organizations' ethics and compliance programs and about results such as how much misconduct staff had witnessed, how aware they were of ethical issues and their willingness to seek advice and report violations. Programs oriented to values, which encouraged shared commitment to ethical aspirations, were associated with better outcomes than programs oriented only to compliance and punishment. What mattered most was not the formal machinery but whether leaders behaved ethically, whether staff were treated fairly, whether ethics could be discussed openly, whether reported problems were acted on and whether rewards favored doing right.

Apples, Cases and Barrels

Kish-Gephart et al. (2010) combined decades of studies to ask where unethical workplace choices come from. Some sources lay in people, the bad apples: Machiavellianism and relativism were associated with more unethical choices, and higher cognitive moral development with fewer. Issue characteristics, the bad cases, mattered: issues of high moral intensity, such as those with clear and serious consequences, produced fewer unethical choices. And organizational environments, the bad barrels, mattered: egoistic climates were associated with more unethical choices, benevolent and principled climates with fewer, and enforced codes of conduct with fewer.

The Assessment

The climate survey showed different climates in different units. Grant-funded research labs were perceived as instrumental, with students reporting that "getting results" mattered most. The training clinic was perceived as caring and law-and-code, shaped by clinical ethics standards. Interviews revealed that two students had raised concerns about Dr. Lang's lab a year earlier, with no response, a failure of follow-through. The chair spoke often about grant success and rarely about integrity. Students perceived that high-earning labs received more departmental support, raising questions of fairness. Many described data exclusion as a technical matter, lowering the moral intensity of the issue.

Recommendations

The recommendations target the factors with the strongest evidence. The chair will speak about research integrity at faculty meetings and in student orientation, and recognize good practice. A process for raising concerns will track each report and tell the person who raised it what happened, addressing follow-through. Funding and authorship policies will be published. Training will present data exclusion decisions as ethical as well as technical, using cases, raising the issue's moral intensity. Lab practices will include preregistration, as recommended in the previous module.

Measuring Change

The climate survey will be repeated annually. The department will also track the number of concerns raised, the time taken to respond and students' ratings of whether they would feel safe reporting a problem.

Why Earlier Concerns Were Ignored

Two students had raised concerns about the lab a year earlier, with a faculty member they trusted. That faculty member mentioned them informally to the chair, who did nothing, partly because the concerns were vague and partly, by the chair's own account, because she did not want to damage a valuable colleague's reputation on uncertain information. No process existed to record the concern or require a response. Treviño et al. (1999) found that acting on reported problems ranked near the top of what predicted good outcomes; its absence teaches people that raising concerns is pointless. The new process records every concern and requires a documented response.

Protecting Those Who Spoke

Interviewees were promised confidentiality, and the review's report describes patterns without identifying individuals. Students in particular feared consequences for their careers. The team stored interview notes separately from the report and destroyed them after the analysis.

The Chair's Own Behavior

The chair accepted that her emphasis on grant income had shaped the climate. She will include research integrity in every faculty review, alongside funding and publications, so that it is rewarded as well as stated.

Different Units, Different Climates

Victor and Cullen (1988) found that climates vary within organizations, and the department confirms it. The clinic's caring and code-based climate came from clinical training and licensing standards that make ethics routine there. The research labs lacked an equivalent. One recommendation follows directly: bring the clinic's habits, such as regular case consultation on ethical questions, into lab meetings, where research ethics questions can be discussed as routinely as clinical ones.

Conclusion

Victor and Cullen's climate types show that the department contains different ethical climates, Treviño and colleagues show that leadership, fairness and follow-through matter more than formal rules and Kish-Gephart and colleagues show that individuals, issues and environments all contribute. For the department, changing the barrel is as important as addressing the apple.

References

Kish-Gephart, J. J., Harrison, D. A., & Treviño, L. K. (2010). Bad apples, bad cases, and bad barrels: Meta-analytic evidence about sources of unethical decisions at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017103

Treviño, L. K., Weaver, G. R., Gibson, D. G., & Toffler, B. L. (1999). Managing ethics and legal compliance: What works and what hurts. California Management Review, 41(2), 131-151. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165990

Victor, B., & Cullen, J. B. (1988). The organizational bases of ethical work climates. Administrative Science Quarterly, 33(1), 101-125. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392857