Self-awareness involves understanding and acknowledging one’s personality, values, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and emotions. Self-awareness fosters self-motivation and better stress management as well as facilitating intuitive decision making. A lack of sufficient self-awareness causes one to act and behave in a biased and unethical way that leads to measurable harm within and outside the organization. The resulting harm can cause great damage to the reputation of an organization.
Common biases bounded awareness, emotions and motivation bars people from paying attention to observable, accessible, perceivable and relevant data. It is due to these factors that bystanders with sufficient information fail to identify unethical behavior leading to high-level organizational fraud with direct societal consequences. These factors that cause individuals to ignore others’ unethical actions include cognitive failure processes such as outcome bias, motivated blindness, indirect blindness, and the role of a slippery slope. It is important to note that these cognitive biases are prompted by certain motivations. Several psychological processes of bounded awareness lead individuals to ignore others’ unethical behavior: the outcome bias, the role of the slippery slope, motivated blindness, and indirect blindness (Bazerman & Sezer, 2016). These processes are largely about our cognitive failure to notice and act on others’ unethical actions. Yet, many of the effects that we discuss have a motivational root. That is, our motivations affect our cognition. The motivation to overlook others’ unethical behavior affects us in many forms, including these cognitive biases. The slippery slope is as a result of self-interest conflict that allows individuals to rationalize others’ unethical behavior.
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Ethical factors that are important in decision making include individual, organizational, and contextual factors. Individual factors include the level of moral development, formal education in ethics, self-concept, short- and long-term orientation, level of ethical sensitivity, risk-taking tendency, and development of self-efficacy mechanisms (Jackson et al., 2012). The organizational factors include societal, industrial and organizational culture, organizational structure and network, and organizational approach to decision making. The contextual factors include the perception of leadership as an opportunity for gain, the perception that the market is highly competitive, and the nature of the ethical issue.
Organizations must promote practices that recognize, appreciate and embrace all indicators of multiculturalism. First, one’s interaction, professional choices, and responsiveness to others’ beliefs, values and heritage must be respected and integrated within the organizations (Hanson & Kerkhoff, 2007). Secondly, organizational, policy and research changes for purposes of promoting social justice and supports constructive cultural differences must be embraced. Further, there should be positive changes in the society’s sensitivity to and recognition of diversity. Lastly, organizations must ensure their employees possess skills on cultural competence and strive to increase awareness of benefits of embracing behavioral changes to be consistent with multiculturalism.
References
Bazerman, M. H., & Sezer, O. (2016). Bounded awareness: Implications for ethical decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 136 , 95-105. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2015.11.004
Hanson, S. L., & Kerkhoff, T. R. (2007). Ethical decision making in rehabilitation: Consideration of Latino cultural factors. Rehabilitation Psychology , 52 (4), 409-420. doi:10.1037/0090-5550.52.4.409
Jackson, R. W., Wood, C. M., & Zboja, J. J. (2012). The dissolution of ethical decision-making in organizations: A comprehensive review and model. Journal of Business Ethics , 116 (2), 233-250. doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1459-3
