"The acceptance and perpetuation of corruption in organizations" extended to society

I know I tend to write a lot about ethics, but it is a very important subject that Business schools ineffectively teach. According to research, Business and Economics majors are more likely to cheat and participate in unethical business practices more than students in any other major. The reason why is still a mystery to scholars.

I see it as a problem in society more than just a line of behavior and reasoning exploited by Business students. From the Academy of Management Executive business research journal's essay, "Business as usual: The acceptance and perpetuation of corruption in organizations" (Anand, Ashforth, Joshi) I read some very interesting reasons for business corruption and how it infects an entire organization. I would like to share these reasons with you:

• Rationalization: describing actions in a way that makes them look inoffensive
• Denial of responsibility: belief that unethical behavior is out of your control and is caused by circumstances
• Denial of injury: belief that unethical behavior harms other people
• Denial of victim: belief that recipient of unethical behavior deserves it
• Social weighting: belief that others are worse than you, so your behavior isn't that bad and people don't have a right to criticize you
  
• Appeal to higher loyalties: belief that unethical behavior is justified by a greater cause
• Metaphor of the ledger: belief that unethical behavior is balanced out by more or larger "good" deeds
• Socialization: where people are believe that unethical practices are normal
• Cooptation: people are rewarded for unethical behavior
• Incrementalism: people are gradually introduced to unethical behavior and so become more accustomed to it
• Compromise: people are put in situations where they try to resolve dilemmas through unethical behavior because it seems like it's the only option

Did you get all that? Many times, the rationalization and socialization processes work together to encourage corrupt behavior. It's a very hard cycle to break.

I have a solution, though. Notice that these very reasons offered by the essay are the same reasons that people give to justify their "sinful" or wrong behaviors. I love that God doesn't take any of these excuses, just as the U.S. law shouldn't. (Why shouldn't the law make exemptions for law-breakers? Because that would create an uneven playing that would really undermine our free market and would leave room for even more substantial opportunities for bending the law.) Anyway, if people want to find a way to stop unethical behavior in organizations, I believe that it needs to start with our personal behavior in society, not just in the organizations. We hold a higher standard for accounting practices etc. but we don't hold personal morality to as a high a standard. This proves to me that the world's condition is pretty wretched, but that God provides hope in restoring us to what we were meant to be like.

So basically, His law is clear, His grace is clear, and we should behave accordingly: with humility in recognizing (not rationalizing) our fallibility, and striving to live up to the standard that God has created.

All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. Romans 2:12-13

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Romans 6:15

It's my last week of school!! I can hardly believe it!!