As a recent Abercrombie & Fitch case shows, obeying orders not always smart. Recently, the manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Virginia Beach decided to keep what some deemed risqué photos of models hung up on his store walls, even though local police told him to take the pictures down. Why didn’t he listen to the cops? Because the manager’s corporate bosses asked him to display the photos.
The manager ended up with a citation by the local authorities and faced possible jail time and a fine. While the charges were eventually dropped, this event serves as a great lesson for all employees out there. You don’t have to do everything your boss tells you to, especially if it runs afoul of the law. Clearly, breaking the law can get you in real trouble, but blindly following orders and engaging in illegal or unethical activities on the job can wreak havoc on your career and possibly hurt other people.
Take Barbara, a Denver-based senior underwriter for a major mortgage company. Over a two year period, she was asked by her manager to sign off on home loans for individuals that she knew were not worthy of loans because of their questionable credit and employment backgrounds. “I determined that the information these people provided wasn’t accurate, or questionable but my manager would say, ‘let it go,’” says Barbara, who declined to use her full name. After months of doing what she felt in her gut wasn’t right, she became depressed as she began to hear about people were losing their homes because of loan defaults. So, this past fall, she decided to take a stand and wrote a letter to the company’s human resource department even though she thought she was jeopardizing her job. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she explained, still a hint of agony in her voice.
The real estate industry, says Ralph R. Roberts, author of Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud, is rife with these types of scenarios that began with the housing boom and have only gotten worse as management at many of these firms become desperate to get business in a housing slump. But it’s not just real estate. Workers in a host of sectors are feeling pressure to compromise their ethics standards, or break the law, according to Patricia Harned, president of the Ethics Resource Center, an independent research organization. Among the top industries where this is seen are entertainment, hotel and food services, transportation, retail, and healthcare, just to name a few.
“There is no question that supervisors and management have a tremendous amount of influence on employees’ decisions on how they handle tough situations,” Harned says. Overall, about 10 percent of employees report they feel pressured to compromise their standards in order to do their jobs, and of those 69 percent say the pressure is coming for their immediate supervisor, Harned notes. “We have certainly seen this situation getting worse as far as the number of instances where employees are seeing misconduct happening around them and feeling pressure to compromise standards themselves. It is on the rise and very worrisome,” she explains. Difficult economic times, she adds, are contributing to the increase. “There is a lot of pressure to increase profits, keep the company going. Workers want to bring value to the company and do well in their jobs.”
Typically, in a large organization, when serious wrongdoing occurs, at least ten to fifteen people are probably involved or know what’s going on, says Richard Cellini of Integrity Interactive, a company that provides businesses with ethics policy tools. “Someone sets it in motion, usually someone with authority, but they don’t do the work themselves. They pass it on. The people who do it are usually the staff. They do what they’re told,” he explains. In most cases, he adds, workers are doing bad things for what they deem are good reasons—to help the company, help the team, etc. “And in the overwhelming majority of cases, they are either responding directly to a request from a boss, or what they think their boss wants them to do,” he says.
