Navigating the Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Effects of Ethical Voice
Approaching a supervisor with ethical concerns about the company and recommendations for possible improvements – a behavior called ethical voice – can feel risky. “You don’t know how this is going to be received,” says Joel Carnevale, associate professor of management and one of the authors of a new study forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology. How such voicers manage the aftershocks that arise when speaking up is at the center of the paper co-written by Lei Huang and Jeremy Mackey, both associate professors of management and entrepreneurship at Auburn University; Ted Paterson, associate professor of management at Oregon State University; and Ph.D. student Xialu Li and professor Dongtao Yang, both at Nanjing University.
“We thought the shift towards the intrapersonal and interpersonal effects of ethical voice on the voicer and how individuals maintain a positive sense of moral self-regard was important to make,” says Carnevale. Prior research had focused primarily on the effects on the ethical performance and social relations of others in the organization.
The researchers drew together two studies conducted in China – a field survey study at a large social media consulting company and an experience sampling study in a branch of a large retail supermarket chain. They largely found their predictions supported.
On the one hand, ethical voicers may experience heightened moral ownership, a sense of responsibility for their own ethical behavior and that of others in their workplace, leading them to disengage from unethical acts at work, even those that fall "under the radar". This finding refines the moral balance model of self-regulation, which would predict that employees may feel license to break rules after displaying ethical behavior. “Instead, they seem to want to continue to build on their moral self-regard,” Carnevale says.
On the other hand, “one of the real novel things we show is that ethical voice can trigger what we call a 'moral burdening effect',” he adds. Wanting to uphold a favorable social image of themselves as a moral model, ethical voicers may feel compelled to engage in largely symbolic behaviors, such as telling coworkers their beliefs on certain social positions. This second effect was more pronounced among women, while – contrary to expectations that men were more likely to see themselves as authority figures and therefore take more moral ownership – women and men disengaged at similar rates from unethical behavior.
“One of the big takeaways for us is that ethical voice is kind of a double-edged sword,” Carnevale says. “While it can be morally uplifting by creating a stronger sense of moral responsibility in the work environment, it might also be morally burdensome, as the employee feels compelled to maintain the favorable moral image they’ve established.”
Huang, L., Carnevale, J. B., Paterson, T. A., Mackey, J. Xiaolu, L., & Yang, D. (in press). Fulfilling Moral Duty or Prioritizing Moral Image? The Moral Self-Regulatory Consequences of Ethical Voice. Journal of Applied Psychology.