“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.
But workers who engage in illegal activity are going to have a weak leg to stand on when law enforcement comes a knocking. “My boss made me do it,” is a defense that doesn’t tend to hold up in court, legal experts say. “It’s like the Nuremberg defense,” says Nancy Cornish, an employment lawyer with Denver-based Kissinger & Fellman, referring to the “only following orders” legal defense used by some of the Nazi officers who were tried by the Allies in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II. The question is, she explains, if you’re acting within the scope of your job duties but you do something illegal, who is liable, you or your employer? Unfortunately, in many cases, the employee can be liable, she says. “When a bouncer assaults a patron on instructions from the club owner the prosecutor is going to tell the bouncer, ‘I don’t care,’” she points out. “If a pizza delivery guy goes down a residential street at eighty miles an hour should he get a ticket,” she asks, even though his boss tells him to speed in order to expedite deliveries? “Yes,” she notes.
