THE DARK PATTERN OF CORPORATE SCANDALS: WHY GOOD MANAGERS MAKE UNETHICAL DECISIONS
Almost every day brings allegations of another big corporate scandal, from reports of demo videos being manipulated to falsify the progress of autonomous driving, brand new planes (and aircraft doors) falling from the sky, consultants cheating on their audit exams, engineers manipulating diesel emissions, employees driven to suicide by a toxic managerial culture, to more financial services salespeople opening fake bank accounts for their customers without them knowing about it.
Such scandals often come with enormous costs. In the case of Volkswagen, Boeing and Wells Fargo, somewhere between $20- 40bn.
People rarely read abouts scandals and think that the next time it could be their organisation. We all tend to believe that bad things are done by bad people and, of course, we are not like them. They are bad apples. Leaders with character deficiencies. Luckily, we belong to the good people.
However, most of the time, it is good people who push organisations over moral and legal cliffs. They are managers with values and good intentions. The typical white-collar criminal could be any manager in any organisation.
In the 1960s and 70s, a wave of experiments by social psychologists demonstrated what average human beings are willing to do. Stanley Milgram found that most people would obey an authority figure even if they are told to give potentially lethal electric shocks to a fellow human being.
Jul-Sep 2024 Issue
University of Lausanne