The Ethical Executive: How to Avoid the Traps of the Unethical Workplace

Citation

Mann, S. (2010), "The Ethical Executive: How to Avoid the Traps of the Unethical Workplace", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 31 No. 7, pp. 665-666. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437731011079691

Hardly a month goes by without yet another headline about unethical behaviour at board level. Enron, Adelphia Communications, Tyco International – these are just three companies whose names are now synonymous with corruption by its own executives. Surely these executives are especially corrupt? Surely, “ordinary” people like you and I could never succumb to temptation to defraud on such a scale!

This book sets out to disabuse us of such a notion. Hoyk and Hersey, in their own entertaining manner, show us through this book, how easy it is to fall into traps that distort our perceptions of right and wrong. There are, they claim, a whopping 45 such traps, and knowledge of them can help us steer away from corruption. This is assuming, of course that we want to! Naturally, any reader who is not basically at heart, an ethical individual (or who strives to be so), need not read on.

So, what are these traps? The authors explain that they are really just impulses that motivate us to act. Such “impulses” or social‐psychological traps include, for example, obedience to authority, which is a so‐called primary trap. Primary traps are external stimuli that drive us to take certain actions. Defensive traps, on the other hand are the drives that propel us to take defensive action in response to guilt or shame after a transgression has already been committed. Examples include “everybody does it” and self serving biases. A third type of trap is a personality trap which are aspects of our personality that can make us more vulnerable to wrong‐doing. Examples of these are low self‐esteem of a need for closure.

Over the course of the book, the authors describe each of the 45 traps across the three sections according to whether they are primary, defensive or personality traps. Each “trap” is dealt with in one or two pages, making it easy to dip in and out without losing track of where you are up to. Following descriptions of all the traps, the last section of the book deals with “analyzing dilemmas”; two dilemmas (real‐life stories of unethical behaviour) are analysed using the traps outlined so far in the rest of the book. Unfortunately, the dilemmas chosen are not from the business world – one is the so‐called Parable of the Sadhu which many business students will be familiar with, and the other is the Rev Jim Jones mass suicide event in Jonestown in 1978. The fact that these are not business settings does weaken the section in my view, as the whole point should be about applying these traps to business settings.

Having said that, this book is an enlightening read. It is easy to read and hard to put down, as we are taken on a journey exploring human weaknesses and temptations. Will reading this book make us more ethical executives? Quite possibly, though it is certainly likely that it will make us more ethical people in general, as we become aware of the foibles of human nature. Definitely a book worth reading.