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58 November/ December 2014 BizEd research CEOS OFTEN MOTIVATE their employees by invoking war-related language, whether they talk about "kill- ing the competition" or "going into battle." According to a recent paper, the good news is that such violent rhetoric makes a CEO's own employees less likely to have ethical lapses. The bad news? When employees at competing companies hear the battle cry, they are more likely to resort to unethical tactics in order to "win." In one experiment, the researchers showed study participants a motivational message from a CEO of a rival company. Half saw a message that read, in part, "I am declaring war on the competition in an effort to increase our market share. I want you to fight for every customer and do whatever it takes to win this battle." The other half saw the same message, except "war" was changed to "all-out effort," "fight" to "compete," and "battle" to "competition." Participants in the first group would be more likely to post fake negative reviews about their competitor's product. What's more, most failed to view such behav- ior as unethical. The researchers also created a different scenario, in which participants received a message from their own manager. Once again, half of the participants saw a message that used violent rhetoric; the other half, a message that used more neutral language. In this sce- nario, participants were reminded that their company's internal policy was to sell only to people whose credit scores were above 600. This time, subjects who received a message with violent rhetoric such as "making sales is a battle" and "put up a great fight" were motivated to follow internal control policies more closely, not less. This finding is "non- intuitive," the authors write, which suggests that "violent rhetoric does indeed activate different ethical scripts, rather than simply priming aggressive behavior." The paper's co-authors include David Wood, a professor of accounting at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; Josh Gubler, a professor of political science at BYU; and Nathan Kalmoe, an assistant professor of political science at Monmouth College in Illinois. "The world of business is replete with examples of violent meta- phors," the authors write, citing Steve Jobs' promise to "destroy Android" and Nokia's declaration of an "all-out war on the mobile industry." It's important for leaders "to understand how linguistic violence can dra- matically shape ethical decision making processes." "Them's fightin' words: The effects of violent rheto- ric on ethical decision making in business" is forthcom- ing in the Journal of Business Ethics. Words of War May Weaken Ethics Josh Gubler David Wood FACULTY PARTICIPATING IN X-Culture, a global virtual team project started by Vasyl Taras at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (see "Grassroots Inno- vation" on page 33), are currently working on a study on the effect of "free-riders" who don't pull their own weight on virtual teams. Although free-riding can be a problem on any team, it can be especially prevalent when team members have never met each other and have no sense of social obligation or reciprocity to each other. A global team's performance can plummet if just one of its members shirks his or her responsibilities, says Taras. "It's all about the perception of injustice," he says. "If one person on a ten-member team doesn't do his share of the work, logic says that the team's performance should decrease by ten percent. But our data show that when one student on a team doesn't participate, it leads to a disproportionately large loss in performance. If two stop participating, everyone stops working because they think, 'Why should I work if those two aren't working and we're all getting the same grade?'" Using data collected from X-Culture projects, faculty already have reduced nonparticipation among X-Culture Getting from Shirk to Work