Pages

Tuesday 19 July 2011

Stating the bleeding obvious

From the University of Washington:-

Organizations have more power to direct employee ethical behavior of than we previously knew.

That’s the bottom line of new research from the University of Washington Foster School of Business that demonstrates, for the first time, the relationship between moral intuition—a reflexive perception of what is right and wrong—and moral behavior.
"Philosophers have been talking about this for ages,” says co-author Scott Reynolds, an associate professor of business ethics at the Foster School. “But now we have empirical evidence of moral intuition and how it works.”

The link between intuition and action is not always obvious. Context is critical. Reynold’s study demonstrates this in the workplace, where a firm’s cultural cues can “activate” immoral behavior in an employee who is predisposed to believe that “business” is an inherently moral activity.

This guff merely describes basic human behaviour, the power of the tribe, tribal leader, tribal elders. How long have we known it? Centuries? Thousands of years? Yes - I think we can go for thousands of years. Back to Socrates and Confucius at the very least.

2 comments:

James Higham said...

Back to Socrates and Confucius at the very least.

Back to when a certain entity was supposedly cast down to earth.

A K Haart said...

Yes - one of his tactics I suspect - enticing us do the same thing in different ways.