Corporate strategies to reduce overhead and increase bottom-lines are suggested as at least partly to blame for this shift. As Fuqua and Newman (2002) note, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, job outsourcing, and organizational restructuring have all had deleterious effects on the work environment. Perhaps more immediate is the normalization of felonious behaviors among management and executives across organizations that rewards individuals for advancing the organization regardless of the cost (Guinto, 2004). This pattern of reinforcement has been suggested to have emboldened executives to utilize any means at their disposal in order to achieve organizational goals. Some examples of the types of behaviors sanctioned under this normalization include misrepresentation of organizational finances, products, or services, fraudulent reporting of finances to investors and regulatory agencies (Brief et al., 1996; Barsky, 2007), as well as decisions to withhold antiquated and harmful environmental standards and protocols in the face of new technologies and standards that would reduce or eliminate harmful consequences to the environment (Tensbrunsel et al., 2000).

Behaviors such as these along with many others, Jones (1991) defines as illegal or immoral business practices which may be beneficial for organizations in the short hasten, but often result in dire consequences not only for the organization but potentially for society-at-large as well. When management and executives engage in decision-making strategies and behaviors that go against social norms and legal statutes, their behaviors impact the overall climate of the organization, and can lead to destructive behaviors among lower level employees and lower level management (Gini, 2006). In light of the recent economic turmoil triggered largely by unethical practices perpetuated in the private sector by executives and management, as well as in the public sector by elected and non-elected officials, it would seem it is important to take greater steps to ensure that individuals who reside in and aspire to these positions of power and authority adhere to a more stringent and responsible code of ethics. Understanding what personality factors may play a role in whether an executive or manager is prone to make unethical decisions and engage in unethical behaviors could encourage pinpointing and developing better ethical decision-making skills among individuals in those ranks. Thus the rationale behind this paper and the research proposed is to question personality structure as measured by the 16PF5 and the potential to develop personality “types” predictive of individual moral disengagement and unethical decision-making at the level of executive and management, with the practical aim of recognizing individuals’ needs for better decision-making skills during the assessment process.

Personality testing in the assessment process has its roots in military applications as early as World War I with the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet meant to screen out recruits more susceptible to shell shock (Heidbreder, E., 1963). The Office of Strategic Services commissioned the development of the Thematic Apperception Test prior to World War II to identify personalities resistant to being corrupted by enemy intelligence agents, in addition to using sentence completion tests to conceal recruits for covert assignments (Holmstrom, Silber, & Karp, 1990). In 1949, Raymond Cattell published the 16 Personality Factors Questionnaire which measures the whole of human personality through five global factors and sixteen sub factors. The structure of the five higher-order factors describes personality at a conceptual level, while the sixteen sub factors assess the fine details of unique personality (Russell & Karol, 1994). Through his early work with Charles Spearman and later work with other colleagues, Cattell utilized factor analysis to uncover and refine what he suggests to be the hierarchical, multidimensional nature of personality (Cattell, 1946; Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970).

The current publication of the 16PF version 5 (or 16PF5) consists of 185 multiple choice items that assess individual daily behaviors, interests, and opinions in non-threatening language at the fifth-grade reading level (Cattell, Cattell, & Cattell, 1993). The five global factors of extraversion, anxiety, tough-mindedness, independence, and self-control are similar in substance to other “Big Five” personality theories measuring global personality traits on a continuum. With the addition of the 16PF5′s sixteen sub factors, the test’s dimensional structure has been found through factor analysis and regression studies to encompass all dimensions of several major personality inventories currently in use including the CPI, NEO-PI-R, MBTI, and the Personality Research Get (Conn & Rieke, 1994; Cattell, 1996). Each of the 16 sub factor scales (Warmth, Reasoning, Emotional Stability, Dominance, Liveliness, Rule-Consciousness, Social Boldness, Sensitivity, Vigilance, Abstractedness, Privateness, Apprehensiveness, Openness to Change, Self-Reliance, Perfectionism, and Tension) are also measured on a rude to high range continuum of descriptive behavior types. For example, the sub factor of Warmth ranges in description from the low range of impersonal, distant, cool, reserved, detached, formal, and aloof, to the high range of warm, outgoing, attentive to others, kindly, easy-going, participating, and likes people (Conn & Rieke, 1994).

The purpose of this study is to develop a taxonomy of personality profiles to predict an individual’s propensity to engage in unethical decision-making and behaviors through Bandura’s (1986) mechanisms of moral disengagement, the eight of which I will detail shortly. Several studies have established discrete personality profiles useful in organizational settings with the 16PF among populations of police candidates (Lorr & Strack, 1994), British managers (Bartram, 1992), appropriate volunteers for Big Brother/Big Sister (Herman & Usita, 1994), and ideal vocational profiles for a variety of occupations (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970). I will detail the findings of two of these studies as examples of the types of personality profiles identified. Three types of police candidates were found through cluster analysis (Lorr & Strack, 1994): The “typical good cop” who is self-disciplined, socially bold, extraverted, emotionally tough, and exhibits grievous experienced anxiety; candidates likely to experience problems (high paranoia, lower self control & extraversion, higher anxiety, evidence of psychopathology); and those in a middle group who scored somewhere in between the two profiles, but generally were lower on interpersonal relations scores than the “good cops.” Using the 16PF to predict appropriate volunteer profiles for Stout Brother/Big Sister programs, a 79.4% accurate classification rate was achieved via the classification of individuals on several dimensions (Herman & Usita, 1994): Apprehensiveness vs. Self-assured, Perfectionistic vs. Tolerates disorder, Dominant vs. Deferential, Abstract reasoning vs. Concrete reasoning, Rule-conscious vs. Superb, High anxiety vs. Low anxiety.

In the management and executive assessment process, personality inventories are commonly involved in both the selection and the development of these pools of individuals. Several considerations went into selecting the the 16PF5 as the most appropriate instrument for this research including its development and empirical validation history (Cattell, 1946; Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970; Cattell, 1996), its applicability in an organizational context (Cattell, Cattell, & Cattell, 1993), and its current level of acceptance in organizational assessment processes. According to Ryan & Sackett (1998), the 16PF is the most widely utilized personality inventory used by I/O psychologists and non-I/O psychologists in the assessment process, a fact echoed in conversation with seasoned and esteemed I/O psychologists and practitioners Richard Jeannerett and Sandra Davis. Davis also bolstered the argument for the 16PF in recognizing its history of employ for the clustering of organizationally useful profiles such as law enforcement officers, security guards, and management. By using such a widely accepted instrument with its strong history of empirical validation across a range of domains, I hope to provide organizations with an enriched use of an already existing tool. The hope is to bridge the gap between science and practice by linking the construct of proper disengagement, which has been shown to predict unethical decision-making, to an organizationally relevant and accepted selection and development tool tapping a broad range of personality structures. Further aims are to facilitate awareness in the assessment process in recognizing the potential moral deficiencies in individuals undergoing assessment, as well as the opportunity for the development of better ethical decision-making skills of management and executives.

Moral disengagement theory developed out of Bandura’s theory of moral agency, where he suggests that individuals selectively exercise control over their thoughts and behaviors through a series of self-regulatory mechanisms (Bandura, 1986). These mechanisms of moral disengagement, Bandura theorized are portion of a deactivation process that removes moral reactions from immoral behaviors allowing individuals to assuage self-sanctions and guilt from such behaviors. In all, Bandura proposes eight mechanisms that function both separately and conjointly in order to allow individuals to engage in behaviors they would normally consider unacceptable: Moral justification, euphemistic language, advantageous comparison, diffusion of responsibility, displacement of responsibility, distortion of consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame.

The first three of these mechanisms entail a cognitive shift in the justification of the behaviors in order to make them seem acceptable (Bandura, 1999). The first mechanism, moral justification infuses the immoral behavior with a greater moral purpose in order to make the behavior seem morally legal. An example of this mechanism could be seen in a mudslinging political campaign where one party uses information damaging to the other party in its advertisements in effort to prove their own campaign’s platform. Euphemistic language entails a moral sanitization of the language used to describe immoral acts, such as the American military imperative during the Vietnam Conflict to replace the operational term “search and destroy” with “sweep and clear.” An industrial example of this mechanism can be seen in the utilize of the terms “outgassing” and “runoff” to describe toxic waste released into the environment. An advantageous comparison shifts the focus from the immoral behavior engaged in to a more serious example of ghastly behavior in order to make the modern behavior seem less harmful by comparison. For example the employee who uses the company car for personal business comparing his behavior to executives who misuse company jet privileges.

The next three mechanisms involve a cognitive distortion of the harmful consequences of disagreeable actions to alleviate guilt and self-sanctions. Individuals using displacement of responsibility place blame on another person, often an authority figure, who sanctioned the immoral behavior rather than taking personal responsibility. Perhaps one of the most sparkling examples of the use of this mechanism was in the Nuremberg trials when Nazi officers claimed only to be following orders in their perpetration of inhumanities during World War II. Diffusion of responsibility occurs when a person commits an immoral act as part of a group. Personal responsibility for the act is removed from the individual and placed instead on the group as a whole. Use of this mechanism is common to riots and aggressive behavior and fighting at sporting events among others. The final mechanism of this group is distortion of the consequences which involves a misrepresentation of the actual consequences of acts. As an example, individuals using this mechanism would justify the theft of office supplies from their place of employment by minimizing the theft’s impact on the company: “They’ll never miss it.”

The last two mechanisms involve a reduction of identity with the target of behavior as the means of rationalization. The use of dehumanization purges the target of their human qualities, allowing them to be seen as less than human and somehow worthy of lesser or inhumane treatment. Readily accessible examples of this mechanism include the incarceration and sale of humans as slaves from Africa across the Atlantic, the use of humans as laboratory animals during the forty years of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, as well as in the Nazi beliefs regarding Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. The final mechanism, attribution of blame, is self-exonerative by placing fault with the target of the behavior. An example of this can be seen in the United States’ march to war following the September 11 tragedy in the rhetoric that galvanized our nation into support for an unfounded war against Iraq. Blame attributed to the regime of Saddam Hussein for the attacks was ultimately unfounded, but the general sense that Iraq “had it coming” and “brought it on themselves” exemplifies the tactic involved in this mechanism.

The build and pathways of apt disengagement have been extensively developed and examined by several researchers over the last decades, and has been found to play a role in aggressive behaviors in children cross-culturally (Bandura, et al., 1996; Gini, 1996), and in adult reactions to terrorism and support of military Force following 9/11 (McAlister, Bandura, & Owen, 2006). Longitudinal work established the temporal validity of moral disengagement, linking it to distal transgressive outcomes in children and adolescents who were administered the Lawful Disengagement Questionnaire (Bandura, 1986; Bandura et. al, 1996; Bandura, 1999; Bandura, et al., 2001). Most work to date has focused on the outcomes of factual disengagement, though recent research has identified four individual difference traits that predict moral disengagement as a mediator (Baron & Kenny, 1986) of unethical decision-making (Detert, Trevino & Sweitzer, 2008): Empathy (Batson, et al., 1989), Moral Identity (Aquino & Reed, 2002), Trait Cynicism (Abraham, 2000), and Chance Locus of Control (Levenson, 1981). The authors also developed and validated a revised Moral Disengagement Questionnaire for use with adult populations, consisting of 24 items tapping each of the eight mechanisms via 5-point Likert-type scales. Retained scale items mirrored Bandura’s original 8 factor structure, with all factor loadings exceeding .40 and no cross-loadings over .25.

Following the previous authors’ examination of individual difference traits as antecedents of moral disengagement and unethical decision-making, I propose to develop personality profiles on the 16PF5 that too predict moral disengagement and unethical decision-making and behavior. This will be accomplished by administering both the 16PF5 and the Moral Disengagement Questionnaire (MDQ) to a sample of graduate students in the various MBA and Management programs at Baruch College. The decision to use graduate students rather than undergraduates was at the suggestion of practitioners Davis and Jeannerett due to their concern that undergraduates would not hold the level of maturity required of the MDQ. Additionally, by using a sample consisting of graduate students in business-related programs rather than undergraduates, I am hoping to accumulate a sample more representative of the target population of management and executives in worry to increase the generalizability of the findings (Rogelberg, et al., 2002; McCready, 2005). In measuring moral disengagement, evidence suggests that it is best measured as a single, higher-order construct rather than via its discrete mechanisms (Bandura, et al., 1996). Though this recommendation will be followed in my data analysis, I also intend to conduct an exploratory factor analysis to assess the possibility of differential use of mechanisms by discrete personality types.

I propose that several of the 16PF5 sub factors are indicative of predicting apt disengagement leading to Hypothesis 1:

Hypothesis 1: The 16PF5 sub factors of warmth, emotional stability, dominance, reasoning, rule-consciousness, sensitivity, vigilance, self-reliance, perfectionism, social boldness, and tension will be significantly related to moral disengagement.

I further propose that the global factors of extraversion, anxiety, and self-control will predict accurate disengagement, leading to Hypothesis 2:

Hypothesis 2: The 16PF5 global factors of extraversion, anxiety, and self-control will be significantly related to honest disengagement.

I intend to consume a two-tiered strategy for data analysis, consisting of an initial correlational strategy to assess the relationships between the various 16PF5 sub factors and the MDQ, as well as a hierarchical linear cluster analysis to develop and succor in interpretation of the discrete personality profiles that predict moral disengagement. Examination of the correlation matrix produced from the collected data will acquire the basis for assessing and interpreting the profiles established through cluster analysis leading to hypothesis 3:

Hypothesis 3: The personality traits found to predict lawful disengagement through the previous correlational analysis will form discrete clusters of interpretable personality profiles.

A final experimental manipulation will be conducted on a random sample of participants selected from within the original sample to further do the link between personality, just disengagement, and unethical decision-making and behavior. Participants selected for this aspect of the peep will be notified via email one week after their initial participation that a mistake was made in the processing of their payment for participation in the look, requesting that they visit the lab during a stated set of hours in order to claim their payment that they were supposed to receive upon completion of the study. As no promise of payment will be made to participants at the time the eye is conducted, those who arrive at the lab with the intent of collecting the money stated in the email will be considered to have made an unethical decision. Participants will receive a second debriefing following this manipulation in order to fully define the purpose and the deception they were involved in, as well as to allay any negative feelings incurred due to their participation in this section of the research.

Several considerations must be accounted for when using self-reports in sensitive areas such as ethics and ethical behaviors (Podaskoff & Organ, 1986). Social desirability and evaluative apprehension are potential issues in this discover (Randall & Fernandes, 1991), and are addressed where possible by several methods. Initially, participants will be assured of the anonymity of their responses, as well as by being encouraged that there are no nefarious answers on any of the items. Further, the 16PF5 has three validity scales embedded into the measure to combat such impression management biases, as well as infrequency, faking strategies, and acquiescence biases. Method variance in self-report methods is also a concern, though the 16PF5 alternates between multiple choice and true/false type questions as one counter to this potential thunder. Further, differently worded same items serve as counters to this potential bias as well (Podaskoff & Organ, 1986). All efforts will be made to minimize the potential for common method bias, though Spector (2006) notes that its impact on interpretability of results in self-report research may not be as insidious and overwhelming as has been previously suggested.

In conclusion, this author through this research seeks to more closely portray the domains of personality, fair disengagement, and unethical behaviors within the realm of the assessment process within organizations. By examining personality traits and profiles as predictors of unethical behavior, I hope to increase empirical belief of why people engage in unethical behaviors through the mechanisms of moral disengagement. From an applied standpoint, this research will hopefully provide an avenue for organizations to recognize existing good deficiencies in the decision-making strategies of its members in management and executive positions, as well as in modern candidates in the initial assessment process. The extinguish goal of recognizing the opportunity to develop better decision-making strategies and standards is one that must not be taken lightly in misuse of the findings from the assessment process. Though just one step in realigning corporate and public sector interests with those of society as a whole, I feel it is an indispensable one in countering the unmistakably failed grasp of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

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