Assignment 3 ARTICLE CRITIQUE
- Select one of the six articles provided in the folder below.
- Use the Parts of a Thesis Statement document to inform your thesis statement.
- Use the template provided to inform your submission.
- Summarize the assigned article. capturing its main ideas and using no more than 20% of the original article's word count.
- Critique the article, discussing your analysis of the following aspects of the article:The degree to which the article reflects currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose
- The types of rhetorical appeals the author uses and their impact
- The types of evidence the author uses as support for their premise and the impact of that support
- Any logical fallacies that you identify and their impact
- Any rhetorical strategies that you identify and their impact
- The impact of the author’s language and tone and what they appear to convey about the author’s attitude
144 Harvard Business ReviewMay–June 2019 How to Design an Ethical Organization _HBR_MayJun19 Harvard Business Review May–June 2019 145 Nicholas Epley Professor, Booth School of Business Amit Kumar Assistant professor, University of Texas at Austin PHOTOGRAPHER STEVEN DERKS ETHICS AUTHORS IDEA IN BRIEF THE PROBLEM Unethical behavior ruins reputations, harms employee morale, and increases regulatory costs— not to mention damages society’s trust in business. Yet corporate scandals are a recurring reality. WHAT DOESN’T WORK Compliance programs take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability—but a large body of behavioral science research suggests that even well-meaning and well-informed individuals are ethically malleable. A BETTER WAY Leaders must design workplace contexts that encourage good behavior. Keeping prosocial values top of mind for employees as they make decisions will reduce the likelihood of transgressions while making workers happier and more productive. From Volkswagen’s emissions fiasco to Wells Fargo’s deceptive sales practices to Uber’s privacy intrusions, corporate wrongdoing is a continuing reality in global business. Unethical behavior takes a significant toll on organizations by damaging reputations, harming employee morale, and increasing regulatory costs—not to mention the wider damage to society’s overall trust in business. Few executives set out to achieve advantage by breaking the rules, and most companies have programs in place to prevent malfeasance at all levels. Yet recurring scandals show that we could do better. START HERE 146 Harvard Business ReviewMay–June 2019 Interventions to encourage ethical behavior are often based on misperceptions of how transgressions occur, and thus are not as effective as they could be. Compliance programs increasingly take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability. They’re designed to educate employees and then punish wrongdoing among the “bad apples” who misbehave. Yet a large body of behav- ioral science research suggests that even well-meaning and well-informed people are more ethically malleable than one might guess. When watching a potential emergency unfold, for example, people are much more likely to intervene if they are alone than if other bystanders are around—because they think others will deal with the situation, believe that others are more qualified to help, or fail to recognize an emergency because others don’t look alarmed. Small changes to the context can have a significant effect on a person’s behav- ior. Yet people in the midst of these situations tend not to recognize the influence of context. In Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, participants who were told by an authority figure to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person progressed to a much higher voltage than other people predicted they themselves would deliver. Context is not just powerful, researchers have learned; it is surprisingly powerful. Pillars of an Ethical Culture CREATI NG AN ET H ICA L culture thus requires thinking about ethics not simply as a belief problem but also as a design prob- lem. We have identified four critical features that need to be addressed when designing an ethical culture: explicit values, thoughts during judgment, incentives, and cultural norms. EXPLICIT VALUES > Strategies and practices should be anchored to clearly stated principles that can be widely shared within the organization. A well-crafted mission statement can help achieve this, as long as it is used correctly. Leaders can refer to it to guide the creation of any new strategy or initiative and note its connection to the compa- ny’s principles when addressing employees, thus reinforcing the broader ethical system. Employees should easily be able to see how ethical principles influence a company’s practices. They’re likely to behave differently if they think the organization is being guided by the ethos of Mr. Rogers, the relentlessly kind PBS show host, versus that of Gordon Gekko, the relentlessly greedy banker in the film Wall Street. Indeed, in one experiment, 70% of participants playing an economic game with a partner cooperated for mutual gain when it was called the Community Game, but only 30% cooperated when it was called the Wall Street Game. This dramatic effect occurred even though the financial incen- tives were identical. A mission statement should be simple, short, actionable, and emotionally resonant. Most corporate mission state- ments today are too long to remember, too obvious to need stating, too clearly tailored for regulators, or too distant from day-to-day practices to meaningfully guide employees. A statement can’t be just words on paper; it must undergird not only strategy but policies around hiring, firing, promoting, and operations so that core ethical principles are deeply embedded throughout the organization. Patagonia’s mission statement, for instance, is “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and imple- ment solutions to the environmental crisis.” Its Worn Wear initiative implements its mission by enabling employees to help consumers repair or recycle their products. Patagonia also developed a standardized metric, posted on its website, to evaluate the environmental impact of its entire supply chain. Zappos says its number one core value is to “Deliver WOW through service” to customers, according them respect and dignity. It implements this value by not measuring the average length of customer service calls (the industry stan- dard), so employees can spend as much time with customers as necessary. Mission statements like these help keep an organization’s values crystal clear in employees’ minds. THOUGHTS DURING JUDGMENT > Most people have less difficulty knowing what’s right or wrong than they do keeping ethical considerations top of mind when making decisions. Ethical lapses can therefore be reduced in a culture where ethics are at the center of attention. You might know that it’s wrong to hurt someone else’s chances of being hired but fail to think of the harm you cause to unknown applicants when trying to help a friend, a family member, or a business school classmate land a job. Behavior tends to be guided by what comes to mind immediately before Even well-meaning and well-informed people are more ethically malleable than one might guess. ETHICS Harvard Business Review May–June 2019 147 engaging in an action, and those thoughts can be meaning- fully affected by context. Should someone remind you that helping a friend necessarily hurts the chances of people you don’t happen to know, you might think twice about whether your advocacy efforts are appropriate. Several experiments make this point. In one, people were more likely to tell the truth when an honor code came at the beginning of a form—thereby putting ethics top of mind as they completed the form—than when it was posted at the end. In a large field experiment of approximately 18,000 U.S. government contractors, simply adding a box for filers to check certifying their honesty while reporting yielded $28.6 million more in sales tax revenue than did a condition that omitted the box. And in a simulation that asked MBA students to play the role of financial adviser, having them complete an ethics checklist before recommending potential investment funds significantly decreased the percentage who recommended what turned out to be the Madoff feeder fund. When ethics were top of mind, the students were more alert to the possibility that the fund was too good to be true. As a counterexample, Enron was notorious for its constant focus on stock price, even posting it in the elevators. Reflect- ing on his own misdeeds, its former CFO Andy Fastow said, “I knew it was wrong.… But I didn’t think it was illegal.… The question I should have asked is not what is the rule, but what is the principle.” People working in an ethical culture are routinely triggered to think, Is it right? rather than Is it legal? INCENTIVES > It is a boring truism that people do what they’re incentivized to do, meaning that aligning rewards with ethical outcomes is an obvious solution to many ethical problems. That may sound simple (just pay people for acting ethically), but money goes only so far, and incentive pro- grams must provide a variety of rewards to be effective. Along with earning an income, employees care about doing meaningful work, making a positive impact, and being respected or appreciated for their efforts. In one experiment, hospital staff members were more likely to follow correct handwashing procedures when a sign above the sink reminded them of consequences to others (“Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases”) than when it reminded them of personal consequences. Never- theless, managers may easily overlook the importance of nonfinancial incentives. When asked how important such incentives were to employees, customer service managers at one Fortune 500 firm tended to dramatically underestimate what they meant to their reports. In addition to aligning financial incentives with desired outcomes, ethical cultures provide explicit opportunities to benefit others and reward people who do so with recogni- tion, praise, and validation. If, for instance, your employees are making people’s lives meaningfully better in some way, pointing that out will encourage future ethical behavior. It may even improve performance, because the reward is aligned with ethical motivation. In one experiment, sales- people for a large pharmaceutical company performed dramatically better after participating in a prosocial bonus system, which encouraged them to spend a small award on their teammates, compared with a typical “proself” bonus system, in which they spent the award on themselves. This approach to incentives may have ancillary HR benefits. People tend to underestimate both how positive they will feel about connecting with others in a prosocial way and the positive impact their behavior will have on others. In a field experiment with Virgin Atlantic pilots, a bonus system for increasing fuel economy was structured so that the bonus went to a charity of their choosing. The resulting increase in their job satisfaction was similar in magnitude to the effect of moving from poor health to good health. Companies that use prosocial incentives are likely to produce happier, more satisfied, and more loyal employees. An ethical culture not only does good; it also feels good. CULTURAL NORMS > Most leaders intuitively recog- nize the importance of “tone at the top” for setting ethical