Chapter 5: Damage Control After Breaches of Ethical Conduct: An Attributional Approach to Accounting for Unethical Behavior

Social judgment and justice are basic human preoccupations (Weiner, 1995). Organizational members are always judging others’ actions and outcomes. On occasion, employees may behave unethically and must account for their behavior. The types of accounts they provide for their behavior are likely to influence the degree to which they are held responsible and punished.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how personal accounts for breaches in ethical conduct can shape the impressions and behaviors of observers. We argue that when actors use specific types of attributions as impression management techniques to account for their unethical behavior, observers tend to hold them less responsible than when these techniques are not used. We feel it necessary to state that our intention is not to provide advice to unethical individuals on how to avoid the consequences of their intentional unethical behavior. Rather, our aim is to provide sound advice and guidance to otherwise ethical individuals in how to minimize the damage created by rare breaches of ethical conduct. We focus on minimizing damage through damage control, which describes a set of organizational operating procedures and structure that are designed to minimize the distress associated with a specific hardship (Goldwasser, 1991).