Selective Morality’s Impact On Incident Investigations
June 11th, 2009Most South Africans keep quiet when undercharged for a meal. In an article in the Sunday Times of 7 June 2009, Subashini Naidoo writes about a survey by market research specialists TNS Research Surveys.
The study looks at how South Africans deal with everyday moral decisions and reveals that we are on a moral low ground. They found for example that most of us think that it is more acceptable to “take home” sugar and tea from the workplace than for an unemployed person to “steal food”. (Some of us may be thinking about the high toilet paper turnover in our companies and wondering if there was a diarrhoea outbreak). “Steal” is more overtly immoral than “taking home”, and there is a notion that the company can afford it.
People are happy to give a public official a “gift”, but not a “bribe”. They are happy to allow friends to copy CD’s and DVD’s but they won’t buy pirate ones. (A friend once asked me to copy some Microsoft software for her. When I refused on the basis that we would be breaking copyright, she tried further persuasion on the premise that Bill Gates could afford it!).
This moral low ground is not unique to South Africa. It happens in America as well. In his book “Predictably Irrational”, Dan Ariely describes how peoples’ latitude increases with non-monetary exchanges. We regard taking money from petty cash as theft. Yet we can take a pencil from work or a Coke from the fridge and find a story to explain it all. We can be dishonest without thinking of ourselves as dishonest. We can steal while our conscience is apparently fast asleep.
The problem of course is how it becomes a norm. It seems that in Industry an operator who causes R1m damage to a machine won’t even be rapped on the knuckles, but the supervisor who reacts, expresses dismay and reprimands him gets disciplined. Look around you, and you can see evidence of short-cuts that people take regularly that we turn a blind eye to. And what about the mass fraud that sick leave has become. It seems that many employees see it as leave that is entitled to them if they have not been sick during the year.
Because these seemingly minor misdemeanours have become socially acceptable, we are reluctant to question the perpetrators for fear of looking petty. But if we just allow them to continue in our companies, performance improvement becomes difficult if not impossible.
When we investigate incidents, we would do well to remember peoples’ attitudes and beliefs, and to highlight them when they cause problematic events in our business.
