BUSI 570 Week 6 Group DB Forum 3 Replies Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 3: Replies

BUSI 570 Ethical Leadership, Group Discussion Board Forum 3: Replies

Thread by [Student Name]

The two group members and their threads are composites; the research and Scripture cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 570.

Reply to Kayla

Kayla, your thread argued that a company cannot claim to value its people while paying its chief executive several hundred times what its frontline workers earn, and I think the research supports your concern on practical as well as moral grounds. Cowherd and Levine (1992) studied 102 business units and found that where the pay gap between hourly workers and lower-level managers on one side and the top three levels of management on the other was smaller, after accounting for differences in skills and responsibilities, product quality was higher. They explained the result through distributive justice: employees who see pay as fair give more effort and cooperation toward management's goals. A meta-analysis of a quarter century of justice studies by Colquitt et al. (2001) found that perceptions of fairness in outcomes and procedures were related to employees' commitment, trust and performance. James warned employers whose unpaid wages cry out against them (James 5:4), a reminder that how workers are paid is a moral matter as well as a financial one. For your company, publishing how executive pay is set, and tying part of it to frontline wage growth, might address the fairness concern even if the gap itself remains large. Would the company's leaders accept that kind of transparency?

Reply to Luis

Luis, your thread argued that hiring people of good character is the best protection against dishonesty, because honest people do not lie on expense reports or inflate sales numbers. I agree that character matters, but research suggests that honest people cut small corners more often than we expect. Across six experiments, Mazar et al. (2008) showed that people cheat enough to profit but not so much that they must change their view of themselves as honest, and that reminders of moral standards, such as recalling the Ten Commandments before a task, reduced cheating. Kouchaki and Smith (2014) found that people lied and cheated less on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks in the afternoon, because everyday activity depletes moral awareness and self-control. These findings suggest that good character works best when organizations support it: placing brief honesty reminders at the point of decision, such as an attestation at the top of expense forms rather than the bottom, and avoiding scheduling high-stakes negotiations or audits at the end of exhausting days. None of this replaces hiring for character; it simply recognizes that even people of good character are human and that systems can make honesty easier. Would your company's expense process change if it applied these ideas?

References

Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425

Cowherd, D. M., & Levine, D. I. (1992). Product quality and pay equity between lower-level employees and top management: An investigation of distributive justice theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(2), 302-320. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393226

Kouchaki, M., & Smith, I. H. (2014). The morning morality effect: The influence of time of day on unethical behavior. Psychological Science, 25(1), 95-102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613498099

Mazar, N., Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2008). The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(6), 633-644. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.45.6.633