Leadership and moral neutralisation

Abstract

This paper explores how moral neutralisation techniques can be employed by business leaders in their moral reasoning. It presents results from leadership training with participants from a Norwegian financial institution. Each participant faced the challenge of being a reference person for an employee who had created social unrest at work. The option of lying about the problems to get rid of the employee initially appeared to conflict with the participants’ moral convictions. Nevertheless, some of them managed to overcome the dissonance by applying moral neutralisation techniques. Focus on moral reasoning of this kind among business leaders is shown to be part of a more general shift in attention from moral character to circumstances in explanations of and countermeasures against moral wrongdoing.