IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/jbuset/v109y2012i3p323-338.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ethical Blindness

Author

Listed:
  • Guido Palazzo
  • Franciska Krings
  • Ulrich Hoffrage

Abstract

Many models of (un)ethical decision making assume that people decide rationally and are in principle able to evaluate their decisions from a moral point of view. However, people might behave unethically without being aware of it. They are ethically blind. Adopting a sensemaking approach, we argue that ethical blindness results from a complex interplay between individual sensemaking activities and context factors. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Suggested Citation

  • Guido Palazzo & Franciska Krings & Ulrich Hoffrage, 2012. "Ethical Blindness," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 109(3), pages 323-338, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:109:y:2012:i:3:p:323-338
    DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-1130-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-011-1130-4
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10551-011-1130-4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Donald Mackenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Post-Print halshs-00149145, HAL.
    2. Gary S. Becker, 1974. "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach," NBER Chapters, in: Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment, pages 1-54, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Frederick, Robert E. & Hoffman, W. Michael, 1995. "Environmental Risk Problems and the Language of Ethics," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(4), pages 699-711, October.
    4. Patricia Werhane & Laura Hartman & Dennis Moberg & Elaine Englehardt & Michael Pritchard & Bidhan Parmar, 2011. "Social Constructivism, Mental Models, and Problems of Obedience," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 100(1), pages 103-118, April.
    5. Lars-Eric Petersen & Franciska Krings, 2009. "Are Ethical Codes of Conduct Toothless Tigers for Dealing with Employment Discrimination?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 85(4), pages 501-514, April.
    6. Jensen, Michael C., 2002. "Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(2), pages 235-256, April.
    7. Jost, John T. & Blount, Sally & Pfeffer, Jeffrey & Hunyady, Gyorgy, 2003. "Fair Market Ideology: Its Cognitive-Motivational Underpinnings," Research Papers 1816, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    8. Desmond Ng & Randall Westgren & Steven Sonka, 2009. "Competitive blind spots in an institutional field," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(4), pages 349-369, April.
    9. James P. Walsh, 1995. "Managerial and Organizational Cognition: Notes from a Trip Down Memory Lane," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 6(3), pages 280-321, June.
    10. Peter Fleming & Stelios C. Zyglidopoulos, 2008. "The Escalation of Deception in Organizations," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 81(4), pages 837-850, September.
    11. Ashkanasy, Neal M. & Windsor, Carolyn A. & Treviño, Linda K., 2006. "Bad Apples in Bad Barrels Revisited: Cognitive Moral Development, Just World Beliefs, Rewards, and Ethical Decision-Making," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 16(4), pages 449-473, October.
    12. Hildy Teegen & Jonathan P Doh & Sushil Vachani, 2004. "The importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in global governance and value creation: an international business research agenda," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 35(6), pages 463-483, November.
    13. Roselie McDevitt & Catherine Giapponi & Cheryl Tromley, 2007. "A Model of Ethical Decision Making: The Integration of Process and Content," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 219-229, June.
    14. Marwell, Gerald & Ames, Ruth E., 1981. "Economists free ride, does anyone else? : Experiments on the provision of public goods, IV," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 295-310, June.
    15. Dolly Chugh & Max Bazerman, 2007. "Bounded awareness: what you fail to see can hurt you," Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, Springer;Fondazione Rosselli, vol. 6(1), pages 1-18, June.
    16. Niki A. Nieuwenboer & Muel Kaptein, 2008. "Spiraling Down into Corruption: A Dynamic Analysis of the Social Identity Processes that Cause Corruption in Organizations to Grow," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 83(2), pages 133-146, December.
    17. Arkes, Hal R. & Blumer, Catherine, 1985. "The psychology of sunk cost," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 124-140, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Krista Fiolleau & Steven E. Kaplan, 2017. "Recognizing Ethical Issues: An Examination of Practicing Industry Accountants and Accounting Students," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 142(2), pages 259-276, May.
    2. Sebastian Goebel & Barbara E. Weißenberger, 2017. "The Relationship Between Informal Controls, Ethical Work Climates, and Organizational Performance," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 141(3), pages 505-528, March.
    3. Barbara Culiberg & Domen Bajde, 2014. "Do You Need a Receipt? Exploring Consumer Participation in Consumption Tax Evasion as an Ethical Dilemma," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 124(2), pages 271-282, October.
    4. J. J. Klerk, 2017. "Nobody is as Blind as Those Who Cannot Bear to See: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Management of Emotions and Moral Blindness," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 141(4), pages 745-761, April.
    5. Barbara Culiberg & Katarina Katja Mihelič, 2017. "The Evolution of Whistleblowing Studies: A Critical Review and Research Agenda," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 146(4), pages 787-803, December.
    6. Ajit Nayak, 2016. "Wisdom and the Tragic Question: Moral Learning and Emotional Perception in Leadership and Organisations," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 137(1), pages 1-13, August.
    7. Katrina Graham & Jonathan Ziegert & Johnna Capitano, 2015. "The Effect of Leadership Style, Framing, and Promotion Regulatory Focus on Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 126(3), pages 423-436, February.
    8. Jamie-Lee Campbell & Anja Göritz, 2014. "Culture Corrupts! A Qualitative Study of Organizational Culture in Corrupt Organizations," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 120(3), pages 291-311, March.
    9. Mark S. Schwartz, 2016. "Ethical Decision-Making Theory: An Integrated Approach," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 139(4), pages 755-776, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fuming Jiang & Tatiana Zalan & Herman H. M. Tse & Jie Shen, 2018. "Mapping the Relationship Among Political Ideology, CSR Mindset, and CSR Strategy: A Contingency Perspective Applied to Chinese Managers," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 147(2), pages 419-444, January.
    2. Carole L. Jurkiewicz & Robert A. Giacalone, 2016. "Organizational Determinants of Ethical Dysfunctionality," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 136(1), pages 1-12, June.
    3. Muel Kaptein, 2023. "A Paradox of Ethics: Why People in Good Organizations do Bad Things," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 184(1), pages 297-316, April.
    4. Claus Dierksmeier, 2020. "From Jensen to Jensen: Mechanistic Management Education or Humanistic Management Learning?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 166(1), pages 73-87, September.
    5. Tzu-Kuan Chiu & Yi-Hsin Wang, 2015. "Determinants of Social Disclosure Quality in Taiwan: An Application of Stakeholder Theory," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 129(2), pages 379-398, June.
    6. repec:awi:wpaper:0485 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Richard Nielsen & Felipe Massa, 2013. "Reintegrating Ethics and Institutional Theories," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 115(1), pages 135-147, June.
    8. Hadida, Allègre L. & Paris, Thomas, 2014. "Managerial cognition and the value chain in the digital music industry," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 84-97.
    9. Powell, J.P., 2010. "The limits of economic self-interest : The case of open source software," Other publications TiSEM fc6d2aa1-8b29-40be-b888-5, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    10. Arnold, Denis G. & Amato, Louis H. & Troyer, Jennifer L. & Stewart, Oscar Jerome, 2022. "Innovation and misconduct in the pharmaceutical industry," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 144(C), pages 1052-1063.
    11. Ina Garnefeld & Andreas Eggert & Markus Husemann-Kopetzky & Eva Böhm, 2019. "Exploring the link between payment schemes and customer fraud: a mental accounting perspective," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 47(4), pages 595-616, July.
    12. Bernasconi, Michele & Bernhofer, Juliana, 2020. "Catch Me If You Can: Testing the reduction of compound lotteries axiom in a tax compliance experiment," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    13. Koessler, Ann-Kathrin & Torgler, Benno & Feld, Lars P. & Frey, Bruno S., 2019. "Commitment to pay taxes: Results from field and laboratory experiments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 78-98.
    14. L. Metcalf & S. Benn, 2012. "The Corporation is Ailing Social Technology: Creating a ‘Fit for Purpose’ Design for Sustainability," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 111(2), pages 195-210, December.
    15. Seraphim Voliotis, 2017. "Establishing the Normative Standards that Determine Deviance in Organizational Corruption: Is Corruption Within Organizations Antisocial or Unethical?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 140(1), pages 147-160, January.
    16. José-Luis Godos-Díez & Roberto Fernández-Gago & Laura Cabeza-García, 2019. "How Does Reciprocity Affect Undergraduate Student Orientation towards Stakeholders?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(21), pages 1-15, October.
    17. Dewan, Yasir, 2019. "Corporate crime and punishment : The role of status and ideology," Other publications TiSEM 08d87b94-7449-4a1f-a3ae-0, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    18. Richter, Ulf Henning & Shirodkar, Vikrant & Shete, Namita, 2021. "Firm-level indicators of instrumental and political CSR processes – A multiple case study," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 279-290.
    19. Ikseon Suh & John T. Sweeney & Kristina Linke & Joseph M. Wall, 2020. "Boiling the Frog Slowly: The Immersion of C-Suite Financial Executives into Fraud," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 162(3), pages 645-673, March.
    20. H'MADOUN, Maryam, 2011. "Afraid of God or afraid of man: How religion shapes attitudes toward free riding and fraud," Working Papers 2011008, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    21. Konstantina Skritsovali & Sally Randles & Claire Hannibal, 2023. "Missing Attention to Power Dynamics in Collaborative Multi-Actor Business Models for Sustainability," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-16, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:109:y:2012:i:3:p:323-338. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.