Abstract
Most companies use codes of conduct, ethics training, and regular communication to ensure that employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. In the present research, we focused on the type of language used in codes of conduct and showed that impersonal language (e.g., “employees” or “members”) and personal, communal language (e.g., “we”) lead to different behaviors because they change how people perceive the group or organization of which they are a part. Using multiple methods, including lab- and field-based experiments (total N = 1,443), and a large data set of S&P 500 firms (i.e., publicly traded, large U.S. companies that are part of the S&P 500 stock market index), we robustly demonstrated that personal, communal language (compared with impersonal language) influences perceptions of a group’s warmth, which, in turn, increases levels of dishonesty among its members.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1745-1766 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Psychological Science |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Dec 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2019.
Funding
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1292-5134 Kouchaki Maryam 1 Gino Francesca 2 Feldman Yuval 3 1 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University 2 Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit, Harvard Business School, Harvard University 3 Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University Maryam Kouchaki, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, 2211 Campus Dr., Evanston, IL 60208 E-mail: [email protected] 11 2019 0956797619882917 2 5 2018 9 9 2019 © The Author(s) 2019 2019 Association for Psychological Science Most companies use codes of conduct, ethics training, and regular communication to ensure that employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. In the present research, we focused on the type of language used in codes of conduct and showed that impersonal language (e.g., “employees” or “members”) and personal, communal language (e.g., “we”) lead to different behaviors because they change how people perceive the group or organization of which they are a part. Using multiple methods, including lab- and field-based experiments (total N = 1,443), and a large data set of S&P 500 firms (i.e., publicly traded, large U.S. companies that are part of the S&P 500 stock market index), we robustly demonstrated that personal, communal language (compared with impersonal language) influences perceptions of a group’s warmth, which, in turn, increases levels of dishonesty among its members. dishonesty perception of warmth communal relation code of conduct language effects preregistered special-property preregistration edited-state corrected-proof Action Editor Ayse K. Uskul served as action editor for this article. Author Contributions M. Kouchaki, F. Gino, and Y. Feldman developed the research idea and designed the studies. M. Kouchaki and F. Gino conducted the studies and analyzed the data. M. Kouchaki drafted the manuscript, and the other two authors provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. ORCID iD Maryam Kouchaki https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1292-5134 Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article. Funding We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Harvard Business School, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Supplemental Material Additional supporting information can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797619882917 Open Practices Data and materials for the present studies have not been made publicly available. The design and analysis plans for the following studies were preregistered on the Open Science Framework: Study 1b ( https://osf.io/epsva ), Study 3b ( https://osf.io/69t4u ), and Study 4 ( https://osf.io/jdbcu ). The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797619882917 . This article has received the badge for Preregistration. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/badges . We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Harvard Business School, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Kellogg School of Management | |
| Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University | |
| Northwestern University | |
| Harvard University | |
| Harvard Business School |
Keywords
- code of conduct
- communal relation
- dishonesty
- language effects
- perception of warmth
- preregistered