The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Review

 

January 27, 2015 Your Boss’s Misdeeds May Taint Your Future Job Prospects When a low-ranking employee commits an ethical breach, the consequences for the firm are usually limited; but transgressions by high-ranking executives are perceived as typical of the entire organization, with far-reaching results, say Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin of Stanford. In one experiment, research participants reported greater opposition to hiring a candidate from a firm where fraudulent behavior was known to have occurred if the misdeeds were attributed to a high-ranking, versus a low-ranking, employee (4.58 versus 4.03 on a 1-to-7 opposition scale). Thus it appears that low-ranking employees are more likely to be tainted by the actions of their superiors than vice versa, the researchers say. SOURCE: Moral Suspicion Trickles Down

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