Moral recognition for workplace offenses underlies the punitive responses of managers: A functional theoretical approach to morality and punishment

ABSTRACT

There is considerable variability across people in their punitive responses to employee offenses in the workplace. We attempt to explain this variability by positing a novel antecedent of punishment: moral recognition. We find consistent evidence that identifying moral considerations and implications for workplace offenses predicts punitive responses toward employees who commit those offenses. Drawing on functional theoretical accounts of morality and punishment, we posit that people are motivated to punish others to the extent that they believe a moral offense has been committed, because much of what it means to commit a moral offense (as opposed to a non-moral offense) is to act in a way that prevents, or inhibits, cooperative behavior to achieve social goals. Punishment can discourage group members from committing those offenses in the future, thereby regulating behavior in a way that facilitates cooperation and social cohesion. We offer correlational and causal evidence that the link between moral recognition and punishment is explained, in part, by participants’ beliefs that committing these offenses prevents cooperative behavior to achieve organization-related goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality
• punishment
• theft
• management
• discipline

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

AUTHORSHIP STATEMENT

The submitted work is original and is the authors’ own work. This manuscript is not under review at any other journal.

ETHICAL APPROVAL

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10508422.2022.2097081.

Notes

¹ There are likely other functions of morality (Smyth, 2017), but at the very least, enabling cooperative behavior to achieve social goals is a central, important function.

² On our view, it is unlikely that people consciously realize that they call offenses moral offenses when those offenses prevent cooperative behavior to achieve social goals. We expect this to be more of an implicit, nonconscious process.

³ In this study and in subsequent studies, we rely on single-item measures. We were compelled by recent work from Matthews et al. (2022), who take a large-scale evidence-based approach to examine the extent to which many constructs in organizational sciences can be reliably and validly assessed with a single item. They find that the vast majority of single-item measures demonstrate strong (if not very strong) definitional correspondence, little to no comprehension or usability concerns, strong test-retest reliability, and very good construct and criterion validity. For our particular constructs, we see no reason why our single-item measures would be problematic, as we do not incorporate multi-dimensional definitions or other complexities.

⁴ Linear mixed-effects models offer distinct advantages to more traditional statistical methods, allowing us to circumvent the need to average across the set of workplace offenses. See, Baayen et al. (2008) for a discussion of the benefits of using this statistical approach over more traditional approaches, and see, Boisgontier and Cheval (2016) for discussion of the movement toward mixed-effects modeling in the social and neural sciences.

⁵ Significance was assessed using Satterthwaite approximations to degrees of freedom, and 95% confidence intervals around beta-values were computed using parametric bootstrapping (number of simulations = 1000). 95% CIs around beta-values offer, on our view, the best available indication of effect size for linear mixed-effects models with crossed random effects.

⁶ As before, significance was assessed using Satterthwaite approximations to degrees of freedom, and 95% confidence intervals around beta-values were computed using parametric bootstrapping (number of simulations = 1000).

⁷ We also computed a linear mixed-effects model with cooperation prevention judgments modeled as the fixed effect and punishment modeled as the outcome variable. The participant and the offense were modeled as crossed random effects. There was a significant and positive relationship between cooperation prevention and punishment (b = .37, SE = .01, t = 25.64, p < .001, 95% CI [.34, .40]).