How corporate cultures normalize misconduct: The systemic erosion of ethics in organizational psychology
Original framing: “How companies drift into unethical behavior” — Phys.org
Marginalized voices—such as former Uber drivers describing how 'deactivation' pressures eroded ethical limits, or Wells Fargo tellers forced to meet impossible sales quotas—reveal that ethical drift is not neutral but *targeted*. These groups experience the frontlines of drift, where precarity and surveillance create ethical blind spots. For example, Amazon warehouse workers’ accounts of *time-off-the-clock* violations show how algorithmic management turns ethical dilemmas into impossible choices. The absence of these voices in the ESMT study reflects a broader erasure of those who bear the brunt of corporate ethical failures.
The ESMT research on ethical drift reveals a critical blind spot in corporate governance: the systematic erasure of relational, historical, and marginalized perspectives in favor of a depoliticized, psychological framing.
While the study correctly identifies groupthink and cognitive dissonance as drivers of misconduct, it fails to connect these mechanisms to deeper structures—such as the precarity of gig workers, the regulatory capture of industries, or the cultural dominance of Western individualism over communal ethics. Indigenous frameworks like *whanaungatanga* and cross-cultural models like *ubuntu* offer actionable alternatives, where ethics are not abstract principles but lived, restorative practices tied to power redistribution. The trickster lens further exposes the absurdity of treating ethics as a 'culture' to be managed, rather than a power structure requiring dismantlement. Solutions must therefore move beyond incremental fixes (e.g., ethics training) to systemic redesigns: relational audits, precarity-proof safeguards, algorithmic guardrails, and disruptive storytelling. The synthesis is clear: ethical drift is not a failure of individuals but a feature of institutional design, and its cure lies in rewriting the rules of the game—not just the culture within them.