Chapter 3 in book: Managing Business Ethics STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT HOW TO DO IT RIGHT

1. As mentioned in the chapter, what are the three factors affecting ethical awareness.
2. Think of an issue at workplace or any where else that people generally think it is not an ethical issue and how these three factors contribute to the low level of awareness
3. Think of an unethical scenario at workplace and write the scenario (brief).
4. Write how a person at each of the stages of Cognitive moral development will react to the situation
5. Ethical judgment may not always lead to ethical action: Think of one or two reasons why? You know what you need to do but cannot do it. Think of example.
6. How does the understanding of cognitive moral development theory help you in managing unethical behavior at workplace

CHAPTER 3 DECIDING WHAT'S RIGHT: A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH Chapter 2 introduced prescriptive ethical theories, developed by philosophers, which are designed to help individuals decide what they should do in response to ethical dilemmas. But psychology teaches us that people often don't even recognize the ethical dimensions of the situation at hand. And, when they do, they often don't think about it in expected ways. So, this chapter is designed to help you understand how people actually think and what people actually feel and what they do by introducing the psychological factorsthe individual differences and mental and emotional processes that influence how people think and behave. It also explains some factors that can keep well-intentioned people from making good ethical decisions and suggests some ways to overcome them. Ethical Awareness and Ethical Judgment If a decision maker is to engage in ethical judgment processes (like those discussed in Chapter 2) that will eventually lead to ethical action, she he must first recognize the ethical nature of the situation at hand. Ethical Awareness Ethical Judgment Ethical Action We refer to this initial step in the ethical decision-making process as ethical awareness. With ethical awareness, a person recognizes that a situation or issue is one that raises ethical concerns and must be thought about in ethical terms. It is an important step that shouldn't be taken for granted. Sometimes people are simply unaware that they are facing an issue with ethical overtones. And, if they don't recognize and label the issue as an ethical one, ethical judgment processes (like those we studied in Chapter 2) will not be engaged. In recent research, parts of the brain that are associated with recognizing the ethical nature of an issue were differentiated from those involved in other kinds of thinking. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in a study showing that when Executive MBA students identified an important point or issue in scenarios, a different part of the brain was more active when the issue had ethical overtones compared to more neutral issues. 1 In a different study, a part of the brain 107 associated with emotional processing was activated when participants viewed morally relevant pictures compared to more neutral ones. Thus, something different happens in our brains when we begin thinking about an issue we recognize as having ethical overtones. Consider the following ethical awareness example. Students are doing online research for classroom assignments. The technology makes it easy to find up-to-date information, download it, and cut and paste it right into a paper that then gets submitted to a professor for a grade. Perhaps you have done this without thinking too much about it. However, in this process, students often overlook the fact that they may be plagiarizing"stealing" someone else's intellectual property. Intellectual property is protected by copyright and patent laws in the United States. These laws are important because there would simply be no incentive to write a book, publish a magazine, or develop a new product if anyone could simply reproduce it freely without any attention to the rights of the person or company that invested time and resources to create it. The education community has adopted academic integrity rules that guide how students can fairly use intellectual property. In keeping with those rules, students are expected to paraphrase and then carefully reference all sources of information. When you're quoting someone else's words, these words must be put in quotation marks, and the exact citation to the source must be provided. In the pre- Internet days, this kind of research meant physically going to the library, searching the shelves for information, copying pertinent information by hand, making careful notes about the sources, and then organizing the information into a paper that had to be typed from scratch. Plagiarism actually required conscious effort in those days. Now, information is so accessible and it's so easy to simply cut and paste that it can be harder to recognize the ethical issues involved. But if your college has an academic integrity policy or honor code, and your professor takes the time to explain the importance of academic integrity, the role of intellectual property in our society, the definition of plagiarism, and your responsibilities as a member of the higher education community, you should be more aware of the ethical issues involved. Under those circumstances, when you're tempted to just cut and paste, you'll be more likely to think about the ethical dimensions of your actionsthe rights of the intellectual property owner, and whether your actions would be considered plagiarism by your professor and others in your academic community. Now for a work-related example. 108 You've just started a new job in the financial services industry. One afternoon, your manager tells you that he has to leave early to attend his son's softball game, and he asks you to be on the lookout for an important check that his boss wants signed before the end of the day. He tells you to do him a favorsimply sign his name and forward the check to his boss. To a naive employee, this may seem like a straightforward and easily accommodated request. But if the company trained you well, you would immediately be aware of the ethical nature of the situation. Your manager has asked you to engage in forgery, a serious ethical lapse, especially in the financial services industry where the validity of signatures is essential to system functioning and trust. Recognizing the ethical nature of the situation would likely lead to some very different thinking about how to respond. Research has found that people are more likely to be ethically aware, to recognize the ethical nature of an issue or decision, if three things happen: (1) if they believe that their peers will consider it to be ethically problematic; (2) if ethical language is used to present the situation to the decision maker; and (3) if the decision is seen as having the potential to produce serious harm to others.3 Let's take these factors one at a time. First, as we'll see later, most people look to others in their social environment for guidance in ethical dilemma situations. So, if you believe that your coworkers and others around you are likely to see a decision as ethically problematic, it probably means that the issue has been discussed, perhaps in a company-sponsored ethics training program or informally among coworkers or with your manager. Such discussions prime you to think about situations in a particular way. When a similar situation arises, it triggers memories of the previous ethics-related discussion, and you are more likely to categorize and think about the situation in ethical terms.4 Using the forgery example, perhaps a company training program provided instruction on the importance of signatures in the financial industry and labeled signing for someone else as forgery. Perhaps the company even presented a similar problem to trainees and you all agreed that signing someone else's name to the check would be wrong. Having participated in such a discussion, you would recognize that signing the check would be ethically problematic and you would be more likely to see your boss's request as an ethical problem. 109