Unethical Decision Making in Organizations

The course is open for interested layperson as well as experts who work on related topics, be it as researchers or practitioners (e.g., compliance managers in corporations).

Currently, the understanding of why good people make unethical decisions is rather limited, related research is rather fragmented, and the management of such problems in organizations is overly simplistic, legalistic, and inadequate. Understanding contexts, including the dangers of routines, the mindlessness of our daily decisions, and the healing power of mindful decision-making routines is of increasing importance. In this course, you will learn the latest knowledge and the appropriate tool box for dealing with ethical challenges that you will face throughout your life!

• Explain the impact of social context on individual decision making using various theories (from Management, Sociology, Psychology, and Philosophy)
• Apply these theories to the analysis of some of the most eminent organisational scandals of the recent decades
• Assess risks of ethical blindness in your own organisational context
• Design interventions to reduce such risks for yourself and your organisation

This course teaches how narrow frames and strong contexts can push good people towards unethical decisions and how they can protect themselves and their organisation against ethical blindness.

The goal of this course is to empower the participants to analyse the risks of unethical or illegal behaviour that might be triggered by powerful contexts. It draws from various disciplines such as management, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and literature, in order to learn what these disciplines contribute to a better understanding of unethical behaviour. The course also analyses some of the most prominent organisational scandals of the recent decades through the lenses of these disciplines.

Whenever we hear about ethical scandals, we tend to believe that unethical or illegal behaviour in organisations is driven by character deficiencies of individual actors. Put differently, we simply assume that bad things are done by bad people. However, numerous corporate scandals have demonstrated that even people with a high level of integrity can break the rules if they are put into a strong context.

A better understanding of why and under what conditions good people make bad ethical decisions will enable us to better protect individuals as well as their respective organisations against the potentially overwhelming power of the context. It will also enable us to cure societies from problems like corruption.

Organising Committee

• Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC-Lausanne)

Programme Directors

• Prof. Guido Palazzo
  Professor of Business Ethics
• Prof. Ulrich Hoffrage
  Professor of Decision Theory

Duration

Continuous training, 7 weeks of study, 1-3 hours/week

Location

This MOOC is an online course available on the Coursera platform

Admission requirements

Open to everyone, no prerequisites required 

Registration fee

On Coursera, enrolling in a MOOC and obtaining a certificate of completion requires payment (see Coursera’s pricing options and FAQ).