ethical breakdowns

how i have seen one of unethical barriers interfere with ethical behaviour in the past?

to illustrate one type of unethical barrier, named by the authors as “ill-conceived goals” (bazerman and tenbrunsel, 2011), the following paragraph describes a particular behavioural pattern present within customer support teams or individuals focused on quantity rather than quality, i.e., oriented to maximizing the number of positive feedbacks rather than to increasing customer satisfaction.

let us observe an example with alisa and bob. alisa has a problem with her operating system. bob works as a customer support specialist with expertise in the operating system that alisa uses. alisa contacts the support team by email explaining the nature of the problem that she is facing at that moment, and she receives a link to an online support ticket, showing a live status on the resolution of her problem. the email gets routed to bob’s inbox. in many cases, bob might be unresponsive or not willing to help alisa due to unfamiliarity with the problem. alisa does not hear from bob but manages to solve the problem on her own in a few days so she closes the online ticket. bob gets notified that the ticket has been closed so he replies to alisa explicitly asking for positive feedback even though he had not helped solve the problem. such feedback will potentially rank bob higher on the corporate scoreboard and incentivise him to continue a practice of not solving any problems but getting positively reviewed.

how this barrier could have been avoided or removed to improve ethical behaviour?

as the authors noted, the remedy for the above-mentioned situation would be to “brainstorm unintended consequences when devising incentives and consider alternative goals that may be more important to reward” (bazerman and tenbrunsel, 2011). further research on key performance indicators (kpi), which are quantitative indicators measuring a company’s success against a set of targets, can help managers propose alternative measurable goals.

following the idea of using kpis as means to evaluate employees’ performance and determine the variable part of its wage, we can experiment with a weighted sum of different measurements to construct a more personalised wage function. these measurements include but are not limited to time invested in resolving an issue, change in sentiment analysis through time, customer feedback within a timeframe, etc.

furthermore, we can use a method called “difference in differences” to see whether a customer support employee had an effect on customer behaviour, e.g., a customer stopped using the service.

references

bazerman, m. and tenbrunsel, a. (2011) ‘ethical breakdowns’, harvard business review

important note: this article is was used for the first assignment for using data-science responsibly course at london business school