"From Yale to Jail"
Why do good people make unethical decisions?
Description
Boeing, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, Fresenius, Oxfam: the recent wave of scandals shows that corporations and also nonprofit organizations systematically underestimate the human risk. In all those cases, organizatoins had to pay a huge price and in all those cases, problems do not relate to the decisions of a few criminals but result from systematic cultural problems and leadership failure. One of the key insights of those scandals is a recurring pattern of normal people behaving illegally in high pressure contexts. You can see it coming! Contexts can be stronger than reason and good people can do bad things without even realizing that what they do is illegal or immoral. I call this ethical blindness – the inability of decision makers to see that what they do is wrong.
For whom
For leaders in organizations who want to understand how to create a culture of integrity for their teams.
Aims and methods
Based on the state of the art in research on the psychology of unethical decision making and interpreting these recent scandals, the aim of this day is to show how leaders push their organizations to “the dark side of the force” and how they can reduce such costly risks. The teaching methods are manifold: lectures, case studies, group discussions.
