author: Michael Robinson

The final chapter in the course textbook talks about leadership ethics. “Ethical theory provides a system of rules or principles that guide us in making decisions about what is right or wrong and good or bad in a particular situation. It provides a basis for understanding what it means to be a morally decent human being” (Northouse, 2013, p. 424). The study of ethics differs from other studies in leadership, in that it is normative, rather than strictly empirical. That is, ethics attempts to develop methods of determining and prescribing what a leader ought to do in order to be considered a morally good leader, rather than simply analyzing what a leader does, in fact, do from the perspective of whether his actions were effective or not in the context of a strict cost-benefit analysis.

The noted eighteenth century German moral philosopher Immanuel Kant held that the motives and intentions behind actions were just as important as the actions themselves in determining whether or not they qualified as ethical (Moody, 2014). According to Kant, it is impossible for a good person to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. To truly be considered ethical, a person has to perform the correct action for the correct reasons (Moody, 2014). Someone who does something that appears to be good to an independent observer, but does it with an ulterior motive apart from the desire to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, is not acting ethically.

Oftentimes, business interests are aligned with doing the right thing, so business leaders do the right thing, because they find doing the right thing to be profitable. However, they lack a genuine concern for their duty to act ethically, and only engage in the proper behavior because it benefits the bottom line. An example of this would be a company who opens a factory in California and extols the virtues of being green and controlling emissions, and then turns around and opens a similar factory in China, with its less stringent environmental protection laws, and proceeds to let its waste drain into the lake, or puts no filters on its smokestacks. This is not to say that every leader who engages in seemingly ethical behavior is doing so only for profit. Many times, incentives pave the way for a business to do the right thing, that they desire to do for its own sake, but are unable to do because of financial constraints. For example, a company may genuinely want to give back to the community, but does not do so until tax incentives make it fiscally possible. In this situation, a leader could be said to be behaving ethically, while still reaping financial reward.

Kant “argued that it is our duty to treat others with respect. To do so means always to treat others as ends in themselves and never as means to ends” (Northouse, 2013, p. 430). Furthermore, Beauchamp and Bowie “suggested that treating others as ends rather than as means requires that we treat other people’s decisions and values with respect. Failing to do so would signify that we were treating them as a means to our own ends” (Northouse, 2013, p. 431).

I would like to give you a horrific example from my own life of an unethical leader doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and failing to treat another as an end in himself. Some of the details have been changed in case said unethical leader happens upon this blog one day and gets it in his head to file a defamation lawsuit.

I was once the employee of a company that manufactured cardboard boxes. One night, one of the guys on the night shift crew was involved in a workplace accident involving a fire. It was located many miles out in the country, and would take the fire department longer than usual to respond. The employee attempted to put the fire out and rescue others, but was burned severely in the process. He had to be transported by helicopter to the state’s burn center several hours away. The owner of the company had every intention of firing him, fearing that he was a liability and would cost the company too much money. However, once the media got word of the story, he started singing a different tune. Fortunately, the employee ended up getting workers’ compensation, so his medical expenses were covered. However, the company owner who had been looking for ways to “cut his losses” the previous week, was now offering cash to help the employee’s family get by while the employee was out of work, and was posing for photo opportunities with the employee’s wife and children. The company owner was praised by the community, but those of us on the inside who knew the real story were disgusted.

At the end of the day, the employee was well taken care of, demonstrating how social pressure can be used to get leaders to behave in ways that produce good outcomes. However, this is far removed from anything that anyone with a conscience could consider ethical behavior.

References

Moody, T. (2014). Kantian ethics. Retrieved from http://rocket.csusb.edu/~tmoody/F05%20191%20kantian_ethics.htm

Northouse, P. (2013). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Author: Michael Robinson

One of the concepts that lesson 9 addresses, in the context of team leadership, is social loafing. “Social loafing is a reduction in effort that occurs when individuals do less work because no one person is responsible for the outcome” (PSYCH 485, 2014, p. 4). Essentially, the social loafer is a free rider. The social loafer takes advantage of the fact that, with a team project, something is going to get turned in, and the team will be judged as a whole. So, the social loafer sits back, content to let others do all the work, and then reaps the rewards of merely being associated with those whose contributions were the true driving force behind the project’s success. It has been my experience that a primary cause of social loafing is misaligned incentives. When some of the members of the group have a different vision of what constitutes success than others, the amount of work they are willing to do differs. Those with higher aspirations end up contributing more than those who have their sights set lower. Therefore, one of the best ways to combat social loafing is to make sure that everyone is on the same page from the beginning as to what they hope to accomplish. An example from a group project in an introductory biology class that I took several years ago serves to illustrate this point.

Several years back, at a community college in Georgia that I attended prior to Penn State, I took an introductory biology course as a prerequisite to higher level science courses. One of the requirements of this course was a group project that involved selecting an organism and then presenting a detailed report about that organism to the class. Groups were randomly assigned by the professor, and consisted of about five students each. My group had a mix of students with different aspirations. Three of us (myself included) wanted to do everything in our power to get an A on the assignment, and the other two were content to just pass. This complicated matters and was a source of frustration, because those of us who strove for excellence ended up doing a lot more work on the project than those who did not care.

At the beginning, we discussed division of labor and what we wanted to include in our presentation. Those of us who wanted a quality final product were met with resistance almost immediately. We suggested using multiple scholarly articles from reputable sources and including videos clips and graphics in our presentation. The other two suggested that we watch a National Geographic video on YouTube about our organism and just take notes from it and regurgitate it to the class. When we explained to them why this would not be sufficient, they begrudgingly went along. Eventually we came up with a game plan that the three of us who wanted the best grade possible believed would allow us to achieve it, and we dispersed. Each of us left the meeting with a set of tasks that we were to carry out and report back with at the next meeting, where we would put our final project together.

At the final meeting, where each of us was to bring our work together to compile into the finished product, those of us who took the work seriously were exasperated with what we saw from the other two. While our parts of the project were well researched and well written, it was obvious that the two loafers had not pulled their weight. Their portions of the project were minimally researched and much briefer than those of the other group members. Their submissions also contained multiple spelling and grammatical errors, and their citations were not properly formatted. Since the deadline was looming, we did not have time to make the loafers redo their part of the project, so the three of us who wanted a quality project ended up redoing the sections that the loafers had been assigned in order to bring them up to our standards.

When everything was said and done with, all of us got an A on the final project. Those of us who wanted it and worked hard for it, and those of us who could not have cared less and were content with a C, all got the same grade. The three of us who actually put the work into the project were basically a three person group rather than a five person group, and the two loafers got a higher grade than they deserved while taking it easy over the course of the assignment. The reason that the loafers were tolerated and the professor was not informed of their slacking is because the other group members did not want to say anything that might create animosity in the future since they were going to be taking more classes with these two. They got what they wanted, which was an A, and figured it was best to let bygones be bygones. Furthermore, there really was no mechanism in place to discipline members of the group who were not striving for the same standards as other members. After all, nothing in the course requirements said “you have to make an A on this project.” As long as the other two were putting forth the minimum effort to pass, they were not technically doing anything wrong. Even if the professor had given those of us who worked hard an A and the other two a C, it would not have changed the fact that the loafers did not end up in a worse position than they originally wanted to be in, since they would have been happy with a C. Those of us who wanted an A still had to function as a three person group rather than a five person group, and work much harder than if all five of us had wanted an A.

This example illustrates the importance of having everyone on the team desire the same outcome. Those who do not care about the success of the project will be less likely to take ownership in the project and do their part to make it as successful as possible. Those who end up having to pick up the slack may end up tolerating the loafers in order to avoid future conflict, or because they do not have the heart to say anything to them. This concept is just as applicable to business as it is to academics. For instance, imagine a group of friends who are starting a pizzeria, and three of them have the goal of building a national brand and franchising their restaurants, and the other two are content to remain a local establishment. For a team to work properly, everybody has to be looking in the same direction.

Reference

PSYCH 485: Leadership in work settings. (2014). Lesson 9: Team leadership, 1-15. Retrieved October 23rd, 2014, from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/fa14/psych485/002/content/09_lesson/01_page.html

Author: Michael Robinson

One of the subtopics of the power and influence section of the leadership course is reward power. Reward power refers to a leader’s ability to motivate his subordinates by providing incentives for performance in the form of resources (French & Raven, 1959). Given humans’ propensity to respond to incentives, rewards are a very important motivational tool. However, “[i]n some situations a leader’s use of reward power can be a problem. Another problem with reward power, is that it may produce compliance, but not commitment” (Lesson 7, 2014, p. 5). In this post, I am going to illustrate some of the ways that reward power can be problematic, using examples from a grocery store that I used to work at. Specifically, reward power can backfire and have an effect that is opposite of what was intended. When used improperly, reward power can inflate employees’ egos and give them an unwarranted sense of self importance, and it can breed resentment and harm morale.

I once worked for a grocery store in a middle sized town in the southern United States. One summer, a new store manager was brought in externally to replace the one who had just retired. The manager was from out of town, and was really not familiar with the culture and politics of the organization that he was taking the helm of. One of the new programs that he implemented an employee of the month program. The way the program worked was that management would periodically evaluate store employees against certain performance benchmarks, and whichever employee performed the best at the end of the month would be rewarded with “employee of the month” honors. The display was very public. The employee’s name was put on a sign and placed at the entrance to the store, and they would also be given a reserved parking space close to the entrance. The employee’s name and accolades from management were also published in the store newsletter, and sent out over the company intranet listserv.

This seemed like a good idea in theory. After all, the manager thought, employees would be incentivized to compete for the award, and would always be on top of their game. In reality, the program was a dismal failure, and was ultimately cancelled after six months. The first two employees who won the award were both terminated for insubordination and poor performance within four months of winning, and the third employee who won was disciplined and demoted soon thereafter. Ultimately, only two of the six employees who won the honor remained with the company for more than a year after winning. What happened was, the program backfired. Shortly after winning the award and being put on public display, there was a very noticeable shift in the employees’ attitudes. They went from being punctual, hardworking individuals to being very cocky and displaying a sense of superiority. Their attitudes toward their coworkers became much more condescending, and they became less willing to fall in line with management’s goals, and became more critical. In short, they felt that because of the special attention and treatment they were getting, that they were better than their colleagues, and the rules did not apply to them.

Morale was also hurt by the program, because many of the other employees felt that it was not implemented fairly. The differences in performance that separated the winners from the rest of the group were often subtle at best, and many times were more perceived than actual. Often, who received high evaluations was dependent upon the employee being in the right place at the right time, so that management could observe them. The store actually experienced a substantial increase in its turnover rate in the following months, as more employees quit in the wake of the program’s implementation. They felt that the preferential treatment that the winners received was disproportionate to what they actually contributed.

This example illustrates how reward power can be counterproductive. Implementing incentive programs can do more harm than good if not done properly. A manager must first have an understanding of the culture of the workplace before he implements reward programs that sound good on paper. In the case of my former grocery store, the manager entered an environment that was very collegial and egalitarian, and transformed it into one of spite and resentment. His program created division and dissent among his subordinates, rather than having the intended effect of increasing motivation and productivity. Had the rewards been more private and more evenly distributed, the program might very well have achieved its aims. Instead, the program ended up fostering a sense of entitlement in the winners and resentment among the losers, and ended in complete disaster.

References

French, J. & Raven, B. H. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies of Social Power. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research.

Lesson 7: Power and influence. (2014). Retrieved October 8, 2014, from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/fa14/psych485/002/content/07_lesson/01_page.html