Business | Religion, ethics and the workplace

Cross the boss

What your manager may have in common with a vampire

SHOCKING as it may sound, bosses occasionally ask underlings to do unscrupulous things. In a study in 2013 by Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI), a non-profit body, 9% of American employees said they had been pressured by managers to undertake a task that compromised their ethical beliefs. Standing up for yourself can be bad for your career. When Countrywide, an American mortgage broker, leant on its staff to commit fraud by passing on defective loans to the government, it fired those who spoke out. Indeed, according to ECI, 21% of employees who reported misconduct at work said they faced some sort of retaliation from their firms.

So perhaps it is better to ward off a dodgy request by signalling to your boss that such an approach would be unwelcome. New research by Sreedhari Desai of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to be published in the Academy of Management Journal, suggests one potential strategy. Just as vampires in gothic fiction can be kept at bay with a brandished crucifix, so too, it seems, can evil bosses.

Ms Desai conducted field research at Indian firms to test whether those who kept a religious symbol at their desks were treated differently by their bosses to those who did not. In another experiment she looked at what happened when members of a team appended a virtuous quotation to their e-mail signoffs, such as “Better to fail with honour than succeed with fraud”. In each case she found that managers were less likely to ask those in their charge to act unethically if they displayed some indication of moral values.

It may be that bosses are reluctant to put seemingly righteous employees in an awkward situation. Or they may fear that such people are more likely to blow the whistle on any improper demands. Or perhaps exposure to a moral sentiment or symbol makes bosses look deep within themselves, consider the ethics of what they are about to ask, and think better of it.

The truth seems to lie in a mix of these factors, says Ms Desai. Her experiments showed that those in positions of power who were exposed to moral or religious symbols were less likely to ask something immoral of any of their employees—but they were even less likely to do so of the person to whom the symbol belonged.

Interestingly, when looking at white-collar workers in India, it appeared that it made little difference whether the two parties shared a religion. Muslims were more likely to respect someone displaying a Hindu deity or Christian cross, for example, than someone who did not display anything. Indeed, Ms Desai worries that bosses who are themselves religious may discriminate more generally in favour of workers who are openly devout, to the disadvantage of those who keep their faith to themselves, or do not have one.

In relatively godless Western countries, workers with a strong religious faith have become increasingly inclined to react against secular pressure by insisting on their right to self-expression at work. For example, in 2013 a British Airways employee won a discrimination case against the airline after it had told her to cover up a crucifix necklace which, it said, breached its uniform policy. In a survey by the Randstad Research Institute, the research arm of a big human-resources consultant, 23% of French managers reported instances of religious conflict in their workplace last year, about double the proportion in 2014.

But attitudes to expressions of personal values at work may vary greatly between similar countries. The early findings of a follow-up study Ms Desai is conducting suggest that, for example, when Americans see a moral quotation appended to an e-mail they tend to take it as a true representation of the sender’s beliefs; Australians, by contrast, suspect the sender is being “holier than thou”, and tend to trust him less.

The Aussies may be on to something. There may not be a correlation between someone who proclaims his religious or moral principles at work and that person’s propensity to act in a moral way. In a further experiment, Ms Desai gave her participants the opportunity to behave ethically or unethically. Then, in what they believed was an unrelated study, they were given the option of appending a moral quotation to an e-mail to others in their group and/or to one sent just to themselves. Those who chose to signal their righteousness only to the outside world were more likely to have misbehaved in the first part of the experiment. Such people might do well to consider Luke 16:15 in the New Testament: “Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts.”

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Cross the boss"

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