Everyday ethics: The disconnect between talk and action

As told to Susan Muldowney

Question: “The behaviour of senior executives can permeate both the internal and external organisational environment. How can the ethics of senior executives lead to ‘organised hypocrisy’, where there is a disconnect between talk and action?”

Answer: To achieve outcomes collectively, organisations require employees to participate in a certain way, to conform and follow certain directions, behaviours, rules and instructions of senior executives. Organisations expect employees to implement their instructions without deviation. 

Disconnects between decision-making and action can occur within an organisation or within its external environment due to strategy, miscommunication or changing demands and logic, resulting in organised hypocrisy. This disconnect can even occur in organisations with the world’s best practices and highly efficient processes.

Senior executives set the direction, targets, tone and culture of an organisation. The board and shareholders may set strategy and key objectives. However, the executive implements the objectives and works across the organisation to deliver internal and external outcomes. 

Executives usually accept certain socially acceptable, regulatory or moral constraints in pursuing organisational objectives. However, executives can lose sight and act inappropriately, either knowingly or unwittingly.

Even those of good character who are skilled at moral reasoning can engage in unethical conduct due to psychological shortcomings, social pressures, organisational stresses and prevailing situational factors that encourage those decisions.

Under pressure, employees of reputable organisations can act inappropriately or unethically in order to meet internal performance demands and organisational expectations, as part of an overall organisational strategy. Both leaders and employees can become party to organised hypocrisy. 

Executives can influence their employees' ethics-related conduct through their behaviours and actions because employees view their relationship with leaders and managers as a social exchange. Executives need to be cognisant of disconnects between their organisational talk, decisions and actions or organised hypocrisy in their external and internal activities.

Executives should ask: are we truthfully and realistically marketing and representing our products and services to consumers? Do we have disconnects between what we say and what we do? Are we complying with socially accepted norms, and if not, why not?