Celia Moore, professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Imperial College Business School in London is our next guest. Celia's teaching sits at the epicenter of leadership and ethics with a focus on supporting individuals to enact their moral agency responsibly. Join Cindy Moehring as she talks with Celia about the future of business ethics education, what's been happening during COVID in London, and the relationship between government and business in the field of ethics.
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Episode Transcript:
00:00 Cindy Moehring: Hi everybody, and welcome back for another episode of The Biz. And today, I'm really excited to have the opportunity to have you here, from Celia Moore. Hi Celia, how are you?
00:11 Celia Moore: I'm great. How are you?
00:12 Cindy Moehring: [chuckle] I'm good. It's wonderful to see you today from London, of all places. Celia is a Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School, and prior to joining Imperial, she held positions at Bocconi University in Milan, which I bet was gorgeous, and London Business School where she was on the faculty there for nine years. She's also been a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and a Fellow of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is currently an Academic Fellow of the Ethics and Compliance Initiative and sits on the UK's Banking Standards Board Assessment Steering Committee. That's a lot. Celia's teaching sits at the intersection of leadership and ethics, which is one of the reasons I'm so excited to get the chance to talk to her today, and she is particularly interested in supporting individuals to enact their moral agency responsibly.
01:04 Cindy Moehring: She's worked with several organizations on how to support more ethical behavior at work, including the Financial Conduct Authority, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, the National Health Service, the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Vienna, Austria, the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, and several major financial institutions. Celia's research focuses on how organizations unintentionally facilitate morally problematic behavior, and on how to resist these consequences. And that's what we're gonna spend our time talking about today. Her work has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Academy of Management, and many others. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company, as well as NPR, the CBC, and the BBC. Celia, it's a true pleasure to have you with us today. Thanks for taking the time.
02:03 Celia Moore: Thanks for having me, Cindy.
02:05 Cindy Moehring: So, Celia, it is just wonderful to have you here with us today, even though you're in London, and I'm here in the US, and as we all know, we're in this time of COVID. So usually, you all are a predictor for where we are headed, at least that's been the pattern for the last nine months or so. Tell us a little bit about what's going on over there right now, and we're taping this in November.
02:27 Celia Moore: So we're about to go back into lockdown towards the end of this week, which is the right decision, and it should have been enacted a few weeks ago. But I know that there's a lot of pandemic fatigue here as there is everywhere, and I think it's more challenging as people enter the winter months. Luckily, the UK is a relatively temperate climate, I'm more concerned... I'm Canadian, and I'm more concerned about my mom in Toronto making it through the winter when it's a lot harder to socialize outside and it isn't London, but, I'm hopeful that 2021 will bring better news for all of us.
03:09 Cindy Moehring: I think we all are, yes. Hopefully, we will have a whole different year. But there's no lack of, I should say, ethical issues that have arisen, I would say in COVID and some of the really hard decisions that leaders have had to make, and there's really no roadmap for making them. So that kind of brings us back to the topic for today, which is talking about business ethics and where it's been, where it is now, but most importantly, where it's headed into the future. One thing I do think is that business and government are gonna have to start working more closely together to solve some of these really big problems that we do have in front of us right now. And the whole thought of talking about where should ethics be headed in the future came to me when I revisited Andy Stark's article in the Harvard Business Review that he wrote about 25, 26 years ago. And at that time, he had identified the problem with the way business ethics was being taught as too general, too philosophical, and just not practical. And so the question I have for you to start with is whether or not you think those are still problems today or have we moved beyond that?
04:23 Celia Moore: I think definitely the way ethics is taught in business schools has changed dramatically. I know many peers in many of the institutions that your listeners would be aware of, we came up at the same time, and there's really been a shift in the last 15 years from a more normative approach to teaching ethics to a more descriptive approach to teaching ethics. So normative ethics is really focused on what ought to be the case, what is right, and there is really has been a pushback about teaching ethics that way because students receive that as in positional on their values.
05:02 Cindy Moehring: Right.
05:03 Celia Moore: So the shift in the last 15 years towards teaching ethics in a more descriptive way, which is more about describing the world as it is, and then giving students the tools they need in order to enact the values that they arrive in the classroom with responsibly is an approach that is much more well-received by students and therefore effective, I think, I hope.
05:26 Cindy Moehring: And I think it's just more practical, right? For them to be able to actually think about, "How am I going to apply this to my business life when I get out?" And to your point with this sense of empowerment, right? They walk in with their own sense of thoughts and values, and the question is, "Don't tell me what's right. Tell me what I need to do to figure out how to think through a difficult situation if I face it and what might those be?" And kind of preparing them in that way. Do you do very much in terms of experiential learning in your teaching so that they can experience learning about business ethics? I know that some of the universities, at least here in the US, have done things like give groups of students some seed money and ask them to go start a business, and then track through what some of their ethical issues are that they have to face as well as the financial and the legal and everything else. Have you found that approach to be effective at all?
06:30 Celia Moore: I do a lot of case teaching, which for ethics is valuable because it requires you to think through different moral problems...
06:39 Cindy Moehring: It does.
06:40 Celia Moore: And then.
06:41 Cindy Moehring: I teach it in a very proactive way, so the students have to get up and give speeches to boards a Jonathan. I've also done simulations and experiments in the classroom, so people... What leads individuals to make better or worse choices under time pressure or with different ways of conceiving of morally meaningful decisions. So I've put people under performance pressure, in the ten, people are under strong pressure to perform, they make worse decisions are less optimal. Right.
07:21 Celia Moore: Right, right. And they have to experience that for themselves, so they actually in a safe environment, get to at least experience what it's gonna be like when they hit the real world and hopefully be better prepared. That's great. So one of the things that you recently did and published some work on was in the behavioral ethics and the social science perspective, and I think folks like you and... And ten Brunel and Linda Trevino have just added so much in that space, but you recently published an article in the Annual Review of organizational psychology and organizational behavior with David Dacre, and it was titled toward a better understanding of behavioral ethics in the workplace. And I was looking at that article and I really liked the way you talked about business ethics on three different levels, it was intra personal, interpersonal and organizational. So could you share with us a little bit about what your findings were from that article and what some of the examples are at each of those levels? So it was a review article, so we were over-viewing other people's research that wasn't primary research of our own, but
08:26 Cindy Moehring: That framework is one way of thinking through what the additions to our field of knowledge have been in the last decade. Yes, so in draw personal research focuses on what happens inside someone's head, so that has mainly focused on emotions, cognitions and identity, and how those three things play into how people make decisions, so there's a lot of work on cognitive psychology and social psychology that really looks at like if you are confronted with situation X, what do you think, how do you feel, and how is your identity activated in a way that then influences the decisions that you come to it. So there's been... For me, some of the work that I'm most interested in right now is the interaction between emotions and cognitions, and how when certain emotions are activated, we are more likely to think about a morally meaningful decision in one way versus another way, so if we're afraid... Fear is a really powerful motivator, yes, we're a lot more likely to make morally problematic decisions because fear activates our desire to hunker down and self-protect the outside and think about what's in the common good, in the interest of the common good, as think in a more in a self-interested way, so that's what we mean by intra for personal.
10:04 Cindy Moehring: Got it. In your personal is either in a group or dyadic ally, what happens when two people get together? Or two or more people get together. How does a group process, group dynamic and influence what ends up happening, so that's when you look at things like speaking up, what about a group process or a group dynamic affects people so that they either feel able to speak up we... Or not, right? The Silence, so that's the research on interpersonal, and then the organizational level is what are the procedural environmental conditions that either create to support more ethical decision making or can... Sadly, undermine.
11:01 Celia Moore: Yeah, yeah. Did that piece of research or any of your Follow on... So that was sort of in a compilation, in a summary of the contributions that have been made to the field of ethics by this new line of thinking, which is so important, if you can't understand why people are doing certain things, then you can't mitigate and plan for how do I know that I know the root cause? How do I design a system that's going to counteract those kind of natural reactions and people... Did any of your follow-on research since then explore what some of those things are, that individuals can do to perhaps counteract the intra-personal dynamics or the inter-personal dynamics to help them speak up more?
11:47 Cindy Moehring: So one of the most exciting pieces of research that I'm doing right now is on how people experience moral distress at work, so that people experience stress at work for all sorts of reasons... Right, what to do or they don't have child care, or they're worried that they're gonna lose their job. There's all sorts of reasons for stress, health concerns.
12:10 Celia Moore: Especially now.
12:12 Cindy Moehring: Exactly. People experience stress at work because of either decisions or contexts or behaviors that they observe that are morally problematic, morally difficult. It's a different type of stress. The type of stress, because for all individuals are more identity, our identity of ourselves as moral people, which almost everyone, except for possibly psychopaths experience quite acutely, everyone believes they are a moral person, as everyone believes they are a strongly moral person, and that's usually an aspect of our identities, it's very central to who we are. Got it. So when that's threatened, when we feel like we need to make a decision that's actually not, that's counter to that entity, that causes a lot of anxiety for us. So I've been exploring how people work through those kinds of
13:12 Cindy Moehring: situations, and what I found really exciting, and this is a very early state research... Yeah, sure, that there are four reactions that people have to these complicated situations, the first one is just complicity, you're asked to misrepresent covid statistics or hide the fact that there's been a covid case in your office so that people keep coming to work... Right, right. Complicity would mean you just do what your boss says and follow through...
13:50 Cindy Moehring: Then there's avoidance, right? I don't really wanna do this, I'm not gonna think about it, I don't really wanna do this. I'm gonna get approval from someone else, I don't really wanna do this, I'm just gonna wait until the problem goes away... Right, that's a pretty common reaction to a stressful situation, and then the other two are more proactive, so the third one is what I'm right now calling collaboration, which is, I find this problematic, I don't know what to do, I'm gonna seek advice, I'm gonna be a dainty I don't really wanna hide this covid case, so I'm gonna ask my peer or my boss's boss or what vendor Trevino would call skip level supervisor, it's not collaboration, finding a way to not have to enact the decision that is problematic. And then the fourth is Defiance, just like, Nope, I'm not gonna do that. It is too inconsistent with my values, I'm not gonna do that. What we find, although we didn't trust that specific decision, I was just giving an example, is that people who choose the first two tactics either complicity her avoidance or lower levels of... Report lower levels of life satisfaction and higher intent to turn over in their organization, whereas people who make the latter two choices report higher levels of life satisfaction and a lower intent to turn over and also a higher engagement with their work.
15:20 Cindy Moehring: We tend to be afraid of people who are gonna defy authority or just live by their values no matter what, all these are the people that are truly engaged and are happier in life, were committed to their organizations and better off in life...
15:38 Celia Moore: Right, right. How interesting. Wow, it just really shows you how psychology plays such an important part in decision-making for individuals, because you were just referencing about how the moral identity is so important for almost all of us, and that's true. I think people still have this misconception that people who do an ethical things or bad people, and we all know that most... There are a few cycle paths in the core course, but most aren't, and they find themselves in a situation where they make the wrong decisions, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad people, and I think that dissonance between making an ethical decision and still thinking of somebody as a good person. Is still hard for people to wrap their heads around it. The bad decisions don't necessarily make bad people that... Good people can make bad decisions. So you also recently published an article in Forbes that was titled our ethical leaders good for business, and no surprise, the conclusion was, Yes, they're good for business, but let's get behind that a little bit, so what do you see that are some of the specific benefits for businesses, when leaders do make ethical choices, and How do you effectively deal with the situation when you do have a leader that isn't making ethical choices?
16:59 Cindy Moehring: It's overly simplistic, right? So, while I of course believe that ethical leaders are good for business, and I can find evidence to support that belief, I don't think it's consistently always true. There's lots of unethical decisions that can be very good for business, at least in the short term...
17:23 Celia Moore: Right, right, right.
17:25 Cindy Moehring: Right. And of exactly as I think we need to be a lot more candid about and willing to admit is that a lot of morally really problematic decisions make lots of profit, and until we sort of conceded that and can sit with that, I think it's even harder to... Make true, sustain progress. So when I make an argument that making ethical decisions is good for business, I am making a long-term argument... Integrator, good. So you can think about something like the defeat devices of Volkswagen that served Volkswagen very well in the short and inter-Milan Turin only after it was discovered that it became a less profitable decision, but actually for many years, it served that organization very well and served many of the individuals making those decisions extremely well, right, right, right. So ethical decisions are only good for business, if we're thinking about good for business in the long term for society, any given can often be gained an advantage from behaving less and morally optimally.
18:53 Celia Moore: Yeah, and it's also so the best leaders, I think today, are able to hold that tension, if you will, in their hands and make decisions for them now, right. As opposed to just thinking about what's gonna get me the most profits or the most sales for the company, they're also thinking about the moral and ethical implications of the decision they're making, they're able to hold that tension together and make a decision in the immediate term that's going to be good both in the short term, in the medium term and in the long term, almost because they've widened their perspective beyond just looking at what's gonna be bust from a profit perspective, let's say, which kinda takes me right into the next question I wanted ask you, which was about the business round tables pronouncement in 2019. So about a year old now, but when they had changed their view of what the main purpose of a corporation was,
19:54 Cindy Moehring: and they had a statement that existed for almost 25 years that was all about the shareholder rain Supreme and it is all about the bottom line. And they recently changed that, as you know, into this much broader stakeholder theory, and in my mind, kind of talk about this tension and holding it together, so that companies should look out for the benefit of all of their stakeholders, including their suppliers and their customers and their employees and the communities that they serve.
20:25 Cindy Moehring: So how do you see that playing into the article that we were just talking about about whether ethical leaders are good for business, and whether or not that really does mean only in the long term, or could it also mean in the medium and short-term now, under the way the Business Roundtable is thinking about it.
20:45 Celia Moore: So I think in the medium and short term, that requires more courage, requires more courage to hold the moral ground in the immediate term... Yeah, sure does, because the difficulty is it is often more expedient to make money in a short term with morally problematic behavior. Yeah, so the idea of cure, I find really interesting when I teach about the old case, and I have to teach about this old case because there just are not enough examples to use more recent ones of Johnson and Johnson and Johnson engines and pulling all of tiling all off the shelves. And when the sin I poisonings occurred, right? You see what happened to their share price, right, and for several months, it just tanked, they lost all of their market share, it goes straight down, but then within I think nine months, it was back up to exactly where it was before. And not only that, the good will that Johnson and Johnson generated from that decision last of them like 35 years, what it almost an uncountable way. Right, right. But to be that CEO holding the ground while they were losing market share and stock price required standing his ground in a way that took some real...
22:15 Celia Moore: Amina encourage, absolutely that there's no magical solution that allows you to make the most profit for all the stakeholders in the short, medium and long-term. There's always gonna be trade-offs. But I do truly, deeply believe that that courage benefits not only society, of course, but businesses in the long term.
22:44 Cindy Moehring: So with that in mind and knowing that courage is something that you're curious about as M I... Have you done any research or do you plan to do any about where leaders who are able to exemplify that kind of courage... Get
23:00 Celia Moore: It. So I think there's several interventions that have been shown to work, a lot of them are based on thinking about a long-term view, like thinking about legacy, the other main intervention that I think has real promise, especially in the short term, is finding ways that organizations systemically can create peers who are willing to partner. So we know from the research on minority descent and speaking up that one of the reasons why it occurs so as rarely as it does, not that it's rare, but as rarely as it does, is because people feel very vulnerable, holding a moral ground by themselves and they believe themselves often wrongly to be the only one who wants to hold the moral grounds... Right, but actually, people just don't like going first.
23:57 Cindy Moehring: Right.
23:58 Celia Moore: They don't wanna be the one to first that lots of people will follow because being more Allis really important to us, so it's how really create the conditions so that no one feels like you have to go first.
24:10 Cindy Moehring: Got it, right. That they can go together, that we can all go to those bigger...
24:15 Celia Moore: Exactly, that, that's where I think there's a lot of room in organizations to both procedurally and systemically create climates and opportunities for peers to come together to make the right decisions together, 'cause it's... We're not alone, we're much more likely to follow the right path.
24:35 Cindy Moehring: No. Oh, that's really interesting. Okay, so I've gotta ask you a question about the future now, so we've talked a lot about the improvements that the behavioral ethics and the psychology and all of that has really brought to the field, and we're at a really pivotal moment, I would say, right now, in our world and the future seems to be coming at us so fast, so sitting here today, if you were to think about three words to describe where you think business ethics needs to go into the future in the next 25 years, what would those words be for you
25:17 Celia Moore: So this was a really hard question to think about, and I'm still struggling with what the final words ought to be, but I think one of them is evidence-based... That's
25:30 Cindy Moehring: Good.
25:30 Celia Moore: Yeah, I agree. So I think the more behavioral evidence we can generate and marshal that shows us how to best support good decisions, we will be in better shape. The second is global. I think the pandemic provides an opportunity to really show us the value of thinking globally,
26:05 Cindy Moehring: And the third is cooperative, right? We're only really gonna get out of the pandemic, climate change, all of the things that are bearing down on us hard, systemic racism... If we find ways to cooperate, and I think one of the negative things that's happened in the last decade is increased polarization and to get out of the messes that we are in and sliding down farther, and I'm optimistic about the future, but I think it will require us to really learn how to cooperate.
26:48 Celia Moore: Yeah, and sort of like I was saying before, across institutional lines, like business and government cooperating together in ways that they never have before. And bringing NGOs along with them and figuring out what role does everybody play and let's go at this collectively and cooperatively to solve these really large problems that we're facing globally, so... Yeah, and use evidence to figure that out. Those are great words. I like it. Alright, this has been fabulous, Celia. I wanna end on something fun that I like to ask everyone that I talk to. We've all been inside a lot more because of COVID... Well, now that we can't go outside as much because it's getting colder, but with some extra time on your hands, have you watched anything or read anything or listened to any good podcasts that have been fun, but also have embedded within them, just some... Just raging ethical dilemmas that made it interesting?
27:47 Cindy Moehring: So a book I read that has really helped me through the pandemic is Rebecca Solnit's, 'A Paradise Built in Hell', and it's a non-fiction book about several different natural disasters and what occurred in their aftermath, and she writes about how the human condition... We fear that natural disasters will lead to selfish behavior and looting, but actually the evidence is that after natural disasters, humans come together, 'cause that's how we survived all of this, all of these things before. That's how London survived the Blip, it's how Mexico City survived the earthquake, it's how San Francisco survived the Great Fire. So humans come together in times of crisis, and so that book gave me great hope. Watching... I enjoy drama that comes from morally complicated context, so you think about the series that have been most influential in the last 15 years, they are all... Not all, many of them are about social environments that have their own moral codes.
29:14 Celia Moore: Yes.
29:15 Cindy Moehring: The Sopranos was about the mafia, that is the context with its own social code that's different to ours.
29:23 Celia Moore: Right.
29:23 Cindy Moehring: The Wire was about drug dealers, which has their own moral code. Deadwood was about the Wild West, so going somewhere where there was no laws and creating a society and law from scratch, or The Handmaid's Tale, creating and then the resistance against a moral code that is really oppressive.
29:44 Celia Moore: Yeah, right.
29:46 Cindy Moehring: All of those are sort of the kinds of things that I like to watch, how do people come together and create a moral community, even if it's drug dealers. One of the things I loved about The Wire was that there was a really strong moral code. Everyone wasn't bad to each other, 'cause the system doesn't work then.
30:11 Celia Moore: Right, right.
30:13 Cindy Moehring: People were helping each other and protecting each other, and... My poor middle child was almost named Wallace after a very altruistic teenage drug dealer. Because I was so interested in that. So that was what I watched.
30:28 Celia Moore: Yeah. That one was sort of like Breaking Bad. I don't know if you watched that.
30:31 Cindy Moehring: Yeah, yeah, that's another one.
30:32 Celia Moore: So that was the same thing.
30:33 Cindy Moehring: A whole moral code... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:36 Celia Moore: Yeah. Very interesting. Well, Celia, this has been really fantastic, and I appreciate your time very much. Great insights and some really great thought-provoking research that you've done and that you are doing. More power to you. Thank you for helping to bring the field of business ethics to where it is today, and for sharing with us where you think it needs to go in the future as well. I think they were very insightful points, so...
31:06 Cindy Moehring: Thanks so much for having me, Cindy.
31:06 Celia Moore: Yeah, you bet. Best to you in these times, and I love the book that you mentioned about the way we react to natural disasters and the hope that that creates. And that's a great note to end on. So thank you very much for your time. And we'll talk again soon.
31:22 Cindy Moehring: Bye, Cindy.
