You would hope that most people would ultimately like to behave in an ethical manner at work, but sometimes circumstances conspire to make doing so difficult.  New research from the University of Michigan highlights how important it is to not only make ethical behavior as easy as possible, but to communicate to staff how easy it is to do the right thing.

The authors highlight how fraud and dishonest behavior at work costs a whopping $3.7 trillion per year globally, and this tremendous cost has inspired a wide range of research into the morality and thought processes behind ethical decision making.  The researchers believed however that much of this research lacked any real link to what real people think when weighing up whether to behave ethically or not.  Previous studies didn’t really probe the various theories individuals have about the matter at hand, and the authors believe this is a crucial factor in our behavior.

“In today’s world truth really matters,” they explain. “Your implicit belief about whether honesty requires effort or not might construct how you think about reality.”

Ethical behavior

The researchers conducted a number of experiments to test whether thinking ethically takes more effort, and whether this in turn helps to predict that persons subsequent behavior.

For instance, in one study they found that the more likely we were to believe honesty required a lot of effort, the less likely we were to actually be honest.  Similarly, in a second study they showed that this belief that honesty requires effort only mattered when whatever situation we found ourselves in didn’t provide us with a strong temptation to break the rules.  When the temptation was strong however, and we also believed resisting that temptation would require a lot of effort, we succumbed.

All of which provides some valuable insights into how we can create cultures at work that support ethical behavior rather than giving employees a reason to give in to temptation.

“When you think a decision is effortful and therefore costly, you can use that as a justification to do the wrong thing,” the authors conclude.