Organizational Dilemmas
John M. Darley
A dilemma is a choice between two conflicting alternatives where both cannot be realized. In an ethical context of a business setting, ‘‘organizational dilemmas’’ may be choices faced by business decision makers in which to choose to behave ethically is also to choose to behave in ways that may harm a corporation’s profit margins or even threaten its continued existence. These are the sorts of decisions faced when, for instance, asbestos manufacturers received medical reports that asbestos inhalation caused lung cancer in workers, tobacco manufacturers received scientific reports on the cancer causing properties of cigarette smoking, or the Robbins corporation received reports that its contraceptive device, the Dalkon Shield, drew dangerous bacteria into the bodies of its users.
The Causes of Unethical Resolutions to Organizational Dilemmas
When episodes of corporate malfeasance are dis covered, and large numbers of persons are in volved, a great deal of public anger is generated. While the public condemnation is appropriate, it is also worth carrying out a close examination of the organizational dynamics that led to these results; an examination that might allow for the reduction of these incidents. The first result of such an examination suggests that organizations that engage in harm doing to their workers, the consumers of their products, or the general public fall into two categories: in the first category the corporate leaders intend to commit the practice, in the second they do not, but, as we will see, complex organizational processes often cause it to happen.
Organizations that seek to do harm. In the first category, it becomes obvious that the organizational principals plan to commit the unethical or illegal actions in order that they personally or the organization gains what profits can be made. The assumption is that the nature of the actions can be concealed, or the consequences of its detection minimized. Examples of this abound: ‘‘boiler room’’ stock brokerage houses that push dreadful stock on customers, siding contractors who disappear with customers’ deposits. Some large and apparently respectable companies have also engaged in these practices: for example, newspaper reports on the settlements that the Prudential Corporation is making with investors lured into ‘‘safe investments’’ that tumbled in value. Nor is it always customers that are the target of such behaviors; the Film Recovery System Corporation hired illegal immigrant workers who could not read English in order that they would not know their health was being endangered by the toxic chemicals they were required to handle without safety precautions.
If the corporate management intends that un ethical or illegal solutions to organizational di lemmas be chosen, then how is it that they make certain that the corporate subordinates resolve dilemmas in the direction of acting unethically or illegally when they face concrete choices to do so? Broadly, this is accomplished in two ways. First, they recruit workers who will act questionably. Investigators of businesses running swindles by telephone reveal that the aver age telephone swindler has worked for a number of such operations before, moving to new ones as legal prosecution closes down the old ones. Second, the corporation uses techniques for the ‘‘socialization’’ of ordinary individuals into acting unscrupulously. These methods of socialization can be specified by organizational social scientists; here we simply mark that they change the individuals involved, generally making them active participants in unethical actions, thus adding to the pool of those who are recruitable for similar actions in the future, and who will independently engage in those actions without organizational pressures to do so.
The social control of organizations in which the top management is complicit in harm doing actions can take three general forms: voluntary change in the corporate structure to eliminate inappropriate pressures, government monitoring to detect wrongdoing, followed by fines, criminal prosecutions, or interventions to force changes in corporate structure, or consumer boycott actions. Many scholars (e.g., Clinard and Yeager, 1980: 229–325) who have examined the actual workings of these social controls on corporate behavior do not find them altogether effective, although some think that they could be strengthened and made effective.
Organizations that get entrapped in wrongdoing. In other cases, the wrongdoing in a corporation is not condoned by the management; instead, it begins at some lower level within the organization. These cases deserve considerable analytic interest because, unlike the cases in which the top of the organization intends unethical actions, it seems that corporate practices could be effective in detecting and stopping these actions. While no definitive surveys identify frequencies, it is clear that in a number of cases in which unethical actions begin in some unit of a corporation, those practices capture the acquiescence of those higher in the hierarchy, and moves are made to cover up the practices. A number of factors bring this about: loyalties to subordinates, superiors’ feelings of negligence and mis management for not detecting the practices earlier, corporate commitments to the quality of the product now discovered flawed or to the industrial practice now discovered dangerous, and/or costs incurred to date that would be wasted if the wrong were to be corrected; per haps most importantly, the humiliation of being a part, although an unwitting part, of an unethical action. For these reasons, corporations sometimes attempt to cover up the unethical actions. In doing so, they often encourage behaviors that are as unethical as the actions that they cover up, and as a second consequence, continue the initial unethical actions, such as when defective and dangerous products have been marketed by corporations long past the point when they discovered that they were dangerous.
How this can be avoided is a question that calls for a good deal of attention. Corporate codes of ethics are helpful if the corporation has a history of taking them seriously. Protected mechanisms for reporting violations to corporate authorities that will take them seriously also have been recommended; outside directors may be used in this fashion. Other mechanisms for supporting those within the organization who ‘‘blow the whistle’’ are important because traditionally whistleblowing is frequently a punished activity.
Bibliography
Clinard, M. and Yeager, P. (1980). Corporate Crime. New York: Free Press.
Schlegel, K. and Weisburd, D. (eds.) (1992). White Collar Crime Reconsidered. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.