myAIPMA new model for ethical leadership: creating more value for society
Max Bazerman | The Mandarin
Environment and psychological processes can lead us to engage in ethically questionable behaviour even if it violates our own values. Improving ethical decision-making blends philosophical thought with business-school pragmatism, writes Harvard Business Review‘s Max Bazerman.
Autonomous vehicles will soon take over the road. This new technology will save lives by reducing driver error, yet accidents will still happen. The cars’ computers will have to make difficult decisions: When a crash is unavoidable, should the car save its single occupant or five pedestrians? Should the car prioritise saving older people or younger people? What about a pregnant woman — should she count as two people? Automobile manufacturers need to reckon with such difficult questions in advance and program their cars to respond accordingly.
In my view, leaders answering ethical questions like these should be guided by the goal of creating the most value for society. Moving beyond a set of simple ethical rules (“Don’t lie,” “Don’t cheat”), this perspective — rooted in the work of the philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Peter Singer — provides the clarity needed to make a wide variety of important managerial decisions.
For centuries philosophers have argued over what constitutes moral action, theorising about what people should do. More recently behavioural ethicists in the social sciences have offered research-based accounts of what people actually do when confronted with ethical dilemmas. These scientists have shown that environment and psychological processes can lead us to engage in ethically questionable behaviour even if it violates our own values. If we behave unethically out of self-interest, we’re often unaware that we’re doing so — a phenomenon known as motivated blindness. For instance, we may claim that we contribute more to group tasks than we actually do. And my colleagues and I have shown that executives will unconsciously overlook serious wrongdoing in their company if it benefits them or the organisation.
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A new model for ethical leadership: creating more value for society, Max Bazerman, The Mandarin, 2020
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