Moral Disengagement at Work: A Review and Research Agenda
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REVIEW PAPER
Moral Disengagement at Work: A Review and Research Agenda Alexander Newman1 · Huong Le1 · Andrea North‑Samardzic1 · Michael Cohen1 Received: 20 November 2017 / Accepted: 29 April 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Originally conceptualized by Bandura (Person Soc Psychol Rev 3:193–209, 1999) as the process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate with their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distress, moral disengagement has attracted the attention of management researchers in recent years. An increasing body of research has examined the factors which lead people to morally disengage and its related outcomes in the workplace. However, the conceptualization of moral disengagement, how it should be measured, the manner in which it develops, and its influence on work outcomes are areas of continued debate among researchers. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of research on moral disengagement in the workplace and develop a comprehensive research agenda that highlights opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature. Keywords Moral disengagement · Situational strength theory · Social cognitive theory · Trait activation theory · Role theory
Introduction Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed a growing number of ethical scandals across a range of organizational contexts (e.g., unethical behavior that led to the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, Bernie Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and Siemens’ employees engaging in bribery overseas across multiple subsidiaries). In attempting to explain the reasons that employees engage in unethical behavior leading to such scandals, researchers in the behavioral ethics field have drawn on a number of theoretical explanations (for reviews of such explanations, see Moore and Gino 2013; Treviño et al. 2014). Such explanations, include the moral licensing theory (Merritt et al. 2010), which stresses that people may act immorally out of an unconscious bias—that Editors at the Journal of Business Ethics are recused from all decisions relating to submissions with which there is any identified potential conflict of interest. Submissions to the Journal of Business Ethics from editors of the journal are handled by a senior independent editor at the journal and subject to full double blind peer review processes. * Huong Le [email protected] 1
Department of Management, Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Locked Bag 20000, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia
researchers label as the moral credential effect—arising from an individual’s previous good moral conduct, and the ego depletion theory (Baumeister et al. 1998), which suggests that when individuals’ cognitive resources are taxed because of having to engage in too many activities that require selfcontrol, they engage in unethical behavior owing to impaired moral awareness. Another promising theoretical explanation as to why individuals engage in unethical behavior at work is that of moral disengagement. O
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