Standing for Business Ethics Relies on more than Simple Beliefs

Ethics may be more important today than it was in the past as international business brings new influences.  But despite its importance, it doesn’t mean standing up for ethics is likely in cases where unethical practices are regular occurrences. Research by Denise Baden (2014) helps define how positive and negative role models mixed with self-efficacy and descriptive norms help business members make ethical choices. The study encourages us to think about how our environment and self-beliefs impact our core decisions. 

Standing against unethical behavior is never easy as one must sometimes move against their social, political, and business networks. Even good people are paralyzed with fear of reprisals and retaliation. To most it is better to be silent and see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to corporate unethical practices. 

Positive role models give an alternative to unethical behavior and provides a stronger context for another’s actions. Businesses that have positive ethical role models within their ranks can expect higher levels of ethical behavior from employees. Negative role models do the exact opposite and set an expectation that making money at all costs is important for success in life. 

Most behaviors are socially based and unethical workplaces prompt individuals into an “everyone is doing it” vantage point. Enron being an important reminder that only one person blew the whistle while many others tried to cover tracks. Self-efficacy is the ability of a person to withstand their social environment and make decisions based upon their core value systems even when it is necessary to go against a more powerful group. 

Another important mediator of successful ethical exchange is descriptive norms or beliefs. This varies from normative beliefs which help a person define how someone should act. Descriptive ethics is very basic and often rooted in the subconscious where personal values are deeply held and embedded. Because descriptive ethics touches the soul it is more powerful than any other ethical system based on social perception. 

Standing for ethics comes with personal costs. One can expect to be targeted, scrutinized, damaged, and sometimes rejected. In extreme cases where criminality is uncovered, their very life can be threatened. To expect people to stand up for their values in a toxic environment is nearly impossible without support. 

Negative role models damaged self-efficacy creating a situation whereby people do not feel empowered to act. Positive role models did the opposite and raised self-efficacy. To stand against unethical behavior when negative role models are present requires higher self-efficacy and a tapping of descriptive value systems. Negative role models increase cynicism and force behavioral controls with beliefs that business cannot be ethical so therefore no one should even try. 

Baden, D. (2014). Look on the bright side: a comparison of positive and negative role models in business ethics education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 13 (2).

States of Conscious Awareness-Internal and External

People constantly seek to create higher levels of understanding and depth of thought. One of the purposes of higher education is to help people understand their world and encourage ways to critically think about it. A method of doing this is to become more aware of yourself and the world in which you live. This requires the ability to think about your premises and understand the way you think in order to remove as many fallacies as possible. More accurate thinking comes with higher levels of conscious awareness and is a sign of a person’s reflective intelligence.

The ability to understand one’s environment by being able to focus attention outward (consciousness) or inward toward oneself (self-consciousness) creates a higher form of understanding (Mead, 1934). As one becomes more aware of the environmental information and internal information they contain about themselves they move up in progression of understanding. This creates higher levels of accurate thinking that can be used to achieve goals. 

One develops such higher order thinking through their conscious awareness of themselves within their environment. One can define it as, “A conscious experience is reflexive in that it consists in part in awareness of itself” (Block, 2007, pp 8). It means that one is consciously aware when they can reflect on their experiences to gain a better understanding. 

One can describe this experience as meta-cognition or thinking about thinking. When one gets good at understanding their internal states they begin to have authoritative self-knowledge. This self-knowledge comes from thinking about thinking about one’s current thought as in the cognito-type reflections (Burge, 1988). In essence, one thinks about their previous thoughts in order to understand their current, past or future internal states. 

Introspection is the handmaiden of higher order thinking. According MacDonald (2008) when one can grasp the nature of one’s thoughts they can also grasp a chain of previous thoughts and introspect on them. The more aware one is of the data that go into those thoughts and various feelings that were associated with those thoughts the higher their state of conscious self-reflection. If one has multiple levels of such experiences and are aware of them through self-reflection they can come to more accurate thinking by rooting out bias.

Some people can go to a point of having meta-self-awareness which is one of the highest forms of consciousness. This meta-self-awareness affords an opportunity to create complex understandings of oneself as well as models of other people’s perceptions (Vogeley& Fink, 2003).  This extended consciousness affords an opportunity to understand others perceptions by reflecting on them and their behavior. It is an ability use that model to predict behavior and make more accurate choices in an environment full of people’s impressions.

Lau and Rosenthal (2011) argue that a high order conscious awareness is based on stronger mental representations of internal states of awareness. As one becomes more complex in their thinking they not only become more aware of themselves but also the world around them. This higher order of environmental understanding encourages survival in difficult situations. It helps to ensure that people make appropriate decisions based upon the internal and external information available to them and ensure accuracy of goal attainment by accurately predicting their environment.

Tips for Developing Higher Forms of Conscious Awareness:

-Understand yourself in your environment.

-Reflect on your past and use that information to make better choices in the future.

-Develop your emotional intelligence and understand where your feelings come from.

-Challenge your assumptions.

-Think about why you think something is true or not true.

-Realize the limitations of others and their perspectives.

Block, N. (2007). Consciousness, accessibility and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience.Behavior and Brain Sciences, 30.

Burge, T. (1988).Individualism and self-knowledge.Journal of Philosophy, 85.

Lau, H. & Rosenthal, D. (2011).Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness.Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (8).

MacDonald, C. (2008). Consciousness, self-consciousness, and authoritative self-knowledge.Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, cviii (3).

Vogeley, K & Fink, G. (2003). Neural correlates for first person perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (1).