BYU business professors find ‘margins of error’ in workplace correlate with unethical behavior outside workplace

Photo by BYU Photo

Organizations need workplace standards to promote safety and quality, so they establish margins of error where some deviation from the ideal is acceptable. For example, it may be fine to be off by an ounce for a cereal box, or the length of a screw could be a few nanometers too long. Or financial records for a large company could be several million dollars short.

Tolerance standards, as they’re called, may lead to better outcomes in the workplace, but researchers from the BYU Marriott School of Business recently published a study in the Journal of Business Ethics showing a paradoxical effect in other ethical domains.

“We called this the ‘tolerance spillover effect’ because as individuals are trained to let small errors slide, that tolerance mindset might bleed into other types of decisions they are making,” said Jeffrey Bednar, management professor and co-author on the paper.

The researchers were initially interested in why some professions showed higher rates of unethical behavior such as cheating on exams. They began to suspect that a trained mindset could be at the root of the problem. And professions with salient tolerance standards seemed to be at greatest risk (e.g., scientists, auditors, engineers, architects, political pollsters, quality controllers and health-care workers).

“What we’re seeing is that people who are working in an environment where they’re repeatedly told ‘it’s okay if something is off by just a little bit,’ may start feeling that way about other areas of their life too,” said accounting professor Ryan Sommerfeldt, a co-author on the study. “It helps us understand one reason why good people might do bad things.”

To test the tolerance spillover effect from the workplace to other situations, the researchers conducted three experiments:

• Experiment No. 1: Participants acted as quality controllers and were assigned to either work with tolerance standards or exact requirements. The participants then completed a scenario-based survey revealing that those working with tolerance standards showed higher levels of dishonest intentions.
• Experiment No. 2: Participants either completed tasks with or without tolerance standards. They were then each offered a bonus for claiming experience with at least 12 features of Microsoft Excel, some of which were fictitious. Participants in the group exposed to tolerance standards were more likely to lie.
• Experiment No. 3: Professional accountants, including auditors, were primed with either their work or leisure identity before completing a task to measure dishonesty. Those who both work with a tolerance standard (auditors) and were primed with their work identity were less honest.

 The three experiments show that tolerance standards in the workplace are key drivers to moral disengagement and unethical behavior outside the workplace. But counteracting this problematic tolerance spillover effect is another piece of the puzzle. Sommerfeldt acknowledged they have only laid out the problem, but education and self-assessment could improve ethical outcomes even now.

“Organizations should recognize that how they train employees may also impact the moral decisions of those employees,” Sommerfeldt said. “We now know the tolerance spillover effect exists, and this alone could help individuals look at their actions with a skeptical eye.”

 Bednar added, “to be clear, this study does not imply that anyone working with a tolerance standard will make poor ethical decisions. But it does imply that individuals who work with a tolerance standard may need to guard against their natural tendency to view small errors as inconsequential as they make decisions.”

 For a personal application, Sommerfeldt has concluded that “it is much easier to be obedient 100% of the time rather than 99% of the time.”

 “We have a gospel perspective at BYU where we know about exactness in our discipleship,” Sommerfeldt said. “If you’re not exact, you’re going to open an avenue for tendencies to deviate in your ethical behavior. If you have that strict mindset in non-moral regions, it will help you stay more to the straight and narrow when you’re in a moral domain as well.”