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research Focus on Faculty Solving the Ethics Puzzle London Business School���s Celia Moore explores what makes good people act badly. �� Celia Moore has spent years studying why good people engage in unethical behaviors. As an assistant professor of organizational behavior at London Business School and a Fellow of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, she knows all too well how human nature sometimes trumps conscience. For instance, in her most recent unpublished study, Moore has found that a leader���s bad behavior has a more profound effect on his or her subordinates than conventional wisdom would suggest. ���People have long believed that people follow the behavior that���s modeled���that they do what their leaders do,��� says Celia Moore. ���We���ve found Moore that when business leaders act unethically, they actually change the way their employees think about ethical decisions. It���s not that employees think, ���I���m going to act badly because I have to.��� It���s that they actually think the bad behavior is OK.��� Sometimes, however, otherwise reasonable people can do unconscionable things just to save face, says Moore. She points to Nick Leeson, whose fraudulent trades led to the collapse of Barings Bank in London. ���He made one small mistake; then he made a slightly bigger mistake to cover the smaller one, and then he did something even more. It was a classic case of ���escalation of commitment,������ says Moore. ���When our ego is tied to our professional success, we can make the largely unconscious decision to maintain the appearance of competence, no matter what.��� Moore is interested in discovering not only what makes people act unethically, but also whether one can predict who���s most likely to misbehave. Recently, she focused on the idea of ���moral disengagement.��� The term refers to a process that enables people to behave unethically without feeling psychological distress or believing 56 January/February 2013 BizEd that what they did was wrong. Moore completed a paper on this topic with colleagues James Detert of Cornell University, Linda Trevi��o of Pennsylvania State University, Vicki Baker of Albion College, and David Mayer of the University of Michigan. Their paper, ���Why Employees Do Bad Things: Moral Disengagement and Unethical Organizational Behavior,��� was published in the Spring 2012 issue of Personnel Psychology. For their study, the group first developed an eightitem survey that could determine whether people have a ���propensity to morally disengage.��� The team then asked several groups of study participants to complete the survey; one month later, the researchers asked those participants how likely they were to engage in unethical behaviors. The members of one group, for instance, were asked how often they had engaged in 13 unethical behaviors, such as stealing an inexpensive item from a store. Those in another group wrote one-page essays about what they would do in the place of a junior trader who was asked by a supervisor to fax misleading information to a client. Moore and her colleagues found that participants whose survey responses showed a high propensity to morally disengage weren���t just more likely to act badly��� they were more likely to view their actions as morally justified. Moore points to a similar phenomenon that occured among the highprofile bankers whose actions led to the financial crisis. ���They frame their actions in morally disengaged terms,��� she says. ���They say, ���It was in the best interest of the company,��� or ���I was looking out for shareholders,��� or ���I was using best business practices.��� They see their actions through a very specific lens.��� In her latest work, Moore is examining how and whether companies bounce back after they���ve been criminally convicted for corruption. But while much of Moore���s work focuses on the workplace, in the future she���d like to delve into behaviors at the business school level. ���Business schools are ranked according to the size of their students��� salaries after graduation, which provides an incentive to drive some people who might work for NGOs or social enterprises into banking or management consulting,��� says Moore. ���I���d like to explore finding better ways for schools to tap into students��� desire to leave positive legacies in the world.���