Share power with your employees and you shall have happier and committed workers. Business leaders have been encouraged to reduce bureaucracy, delegate responsibilities to their employees or involve them in the decision-making process, in the bid to up productivity and employee engagement.
But sometimes, there are unintended consequences. Feeling empowered, some employees may engage in unethical behaviour.
As Lord John Acton famously declared, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The possession of power may make one more inclined to promote their own interest, ignore others’ well-being, or generally behave selfishly. In the workplace context, this could range from being rude to colleagues and spreading rumours, to stealing credit for others’ work and falsifying documents for personal gains.
But power does not corrupt automatically. The empowered employee’s moral character and desire to dominate over others are part of the concoction that determine whether he/she goes astray.
In a paper published in the Journal of Business Ethics, my collaborators and I surveyed 250 pairs of employees and their leaders from different companies in China. They answered questions on the leader’s empowering behaviour, the employee’s sense of psychological power, moral identity, desire for dominance, and deviant behaviour at three different points in time.
Our results showed that empowering leadership is positively related to a sense of psychological power, which in turn leads to increased astray behaviour, only when followers have a weak moral identity and a strong desire for dominance.
Similar results were obtained in a second study, with close to 500 full-time employees in the United States. In this experiment, they were asked to imagine themselves as part of a task force for planning a staff retreat. One group experienced empowering leadership, when the leader of the task force expressed confidence in their ability through email. In the other group, the leader cast doubt on the group’s performance and prohibited them from making decisions on their own.
The participants were then asked to do a math exercise, with a small sum given for each question that they declared they had solved. The sums were actually unsolvable, and around 36 per cent of all participants falsely declared that they had solved the sums in order to get more payment.
Again, the analysis showed that participants in the empowered group felt more powerful than those in the low empowered group. This heightened sense of psychological power in turn leads to the deviant behaviour of false declaration. This is more prominent among participants who reported a weak moral identity and a strong desire for dominance.
That is not to say that leaders are discouraged from empowering their followers. There are still many benefits on empowering followers, it is only a double-edged sword for a minority. To mitigate the negative consequences, employers should assess a potential hire’s moral character closely, in addition to his/her skills. While one may not fully understand the applicant through a 30-minute interview, questions such as “Can you share how you handled an ethical dilemma in the past?” would shed light on the applicant’s future approach to similar incidents.
Another way is to promote a strong ethical company culture, which may suppress the desire of scoring wins at the expense of others. In delegating power, the leader should remind the follower how the freedom should be utilized—what processes should be followed and what outcomes should be achieved.
A moral compass is still important in this day and time.
The article is an abridged version of the one first published in SCMP.