PhD Defence: Morality in Interactions
Whether people choose to do the right thing in an organisational context does not only depend on their own moral values, as is commonly assumed, but also on other people surrounding them. In her PhD thesis entitled Morality in Interactions: On the Display of Moral Behavior by Leaders and Employees, Suzanne van Gils analyses the interplay between employees and their organisational environment.
She argues that moral behaviour is determined by a person’s context as much as by the person’s personality, which might influence the way ethical failures in organisations are discussed and reported.
In this thesis, Van Gils offers practical insights into the effects of moral behaviour in the workplace. Overall, her research suggests a unique influence of factors in the social context on people’s moral behaviour, for example how the leader’s moral behaviour influences positive follower behaviour, such as helping out a colleague, or negative behaviour such as falsifying receipts or dragging out work to get paid overtime.
In the aftermath of ethical scandals in the past decade, there is a strong need to understand how to increase moral and avoid immoral behaviour in organisations. The studies presented in Van Gils’ thesis shed light on how the absence of ethical leadership can motivate deviant behaviour. In addition, by investigating the effect of variables such as organizational identification on moral behaviour, Van Gils suggests an indirect way for training ethical behaviour in organisations, which could overcome the problem that ethics training in organisations is often a sensitive subject because people do not like to receive prescriptions on how to be moral.
Suzanne van Gils defended her dissertation on 6 December 2012. Her supervisor was <link people daan-van-knippenberg>Professor Daan van Knippenberg. Her co-supervisor was Professor Niels Van Quaquebeke. Other members of the Doctoral Committee were Professor Rob van Tulder, Dr Steffen Giessner and Dr Dirk van Dierendonck (RSM), Professor Michael Hogg (Claremont Graduate University), and Dr Frank Belschak (University of Amsterdam).
About Suzanne van Gils
Suzanne van Gils (1984, the Netherlands) received her Master’s degree in Social Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2007. She decided to continue studying human behaviour by pursuing a PhD at RSM. The research conducted during her PhD project concerns moral behaviour in organisations, and was supervised by Professor Daan van Knippenberg and Dr Niels Van Quaquebeke.
During her project Suzanne spent 5 months visiting Professor Michael Hogg’s Social Identity lab at Claremont Graduate University. The results of the research conducted at RSM and CGU are reported in this dissertation, and have been presented at various international conferences. Suzanne is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg, Germany.
Abstract of Morality in Interactions: On the Display of Moral Behavior by Leaders and Employees
Recent research has tried to understand moral behaviour in the workplace mainly from an intra-personal perspective, blaming ethical failures on the person’s moral character, moral development or moral identity, or on isolated aspects of the situation. In doing so, little attention has been paid to the interplay between the person and the interpersonal context in which this behaviour takes place. Thus, an important angle for investigating the question why good people do bad things has yet remained unexplored.
In this thesis Van Gils presents four chapters that illustrate this interpersonal influence in the context of ethical behaviour within organisations. She discusses how leaders and followers influence each other’s moral behaviour, how the organisation’s moral norms influence employees moral decisions especially when they identify strongly with the organisation, how follower moral awareness influences the effects of ethical leadership on the employee’s deviant behaviour, and how demographic differences between leaders and followers influence the effect moral leadership has on employee performance.
