Compliant Sinners, Obstinate Saints: How Power and Self-Focus Determine the Effectiveness of Social Influences in Ethical Decision Making

By Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau. 2013

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this research, we examine when and why organizational environments influence how employees respond to moral issues. Past research proposed that social influences in organizations affect employees' ethical decision making, but did not explain when and why some individuals are affected by the organizational environment and some disregard it. To address this problem, we drew on research on power to propose that power makes people more self-focused, which, in turn, makes them more likely to act upon their preferences and ignore (un)ethical social influences. Using both experimental and field methods, we tested our model across the three main paradigms of social influence: informational influence (Study 1 and 2), normative influence (Study 3), and compliance (Study 4). Results offer converging evidence for our theory.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems and Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/676dba6c6c9da3100901ecd3a74ca6f61496c596

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Zhen Wang
2. Lu Xing
3. S. Desai
4. S. Hannah
5. Maryam Kouchaki
6. H. Xu

In Information Systems and Management

1. Zhen Wang
2. Lu Xing
3. S. Desai
4. S. Hannah
5. Maryam Kouchaki
6. H. Xu
7. Dongkyu Kim

In Social Psychology

1. Zhen Wang
2. Lu Xing
3. S. Desai
4. S. Hannah
5. Maryam Kouchaki
6. H. Xu
7. Bruce J. Avolio

Citations in the corpus

• Moral Symbols: A Necklace of Garlic against Unethical Requests (2017, methodology): “Participants engaged in a decision making task adapted from Schweitzer, DeChurch, and Gibson (2005) and also used by Pitesa and Thau (2013).”
• Not All Followers Socially Learn from Ethical Leaders: The Roles of Followers’ Moral Identity and Leader Identification in the Ethical Leadership Process (2019, methodology): “For these reasons, self-reporting of unethical behavior has been widely used in recent research (e.g., Moore et al. 2012, Owens et al. 2019; Pitesa and Thau 2013; Quade et al. 2017).”