“Why Do I Do What I Do? How Searching for Meaning at Work Can Facilitate the Spread of Unethical Conduct Through Organizations”
by Marius Van Dijke
RSM
Place: MA-330
Abstract
Existing work has explained the trickling down of unethical leader behavior through organizations in terms of social learning or social exchange processes. We identify a key limitation of these explanations and propose a novel process to explain the trickling down of unethical leader behavior. We build on Baumeister’s (1991) account of meaning, which depicts it as a system of mental connections between objects and events. We propose that strongly (vs. weakly) searching for meaning at work strengthens trickle-down effects of unethical leadership from higher-level managers, via lower-level managers to employees. We found support for our predictions in a survey conducted among employees and their lower-level managers (Study 1), in an experiment where all participants were in the lower-level manager role (Study 2), and in two yoked experiments with participants in the role of lower-level manager (Study 3a) or employee (Study 3b). Studies 3a-b also identified perceived organizational validation of behavioral alignment as a moderator to the role of searching for meaning at work. This research highlights a possible dark side of searching for meaning at work and it identifies a novel process that explains how unethical behavior cascades through organizational hierarchies.
Bio
Marius van Dijke is full professor of behavioural ethics at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, the Netherlands. His scholarly interests lie at the intersection of morality, social justice, power, trust, and leadership. Issues he examines in his research include when power stimulates moral and immoral behavior, why people so deeply value social justice, and what the role is of automatic and controlled psychological processes in moral judgment and behavior. He has published widely on these topics in top tier journals in management and psychology.
