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we're at a place where we know a lot about the problems but what we need more
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work on are solutions to those problems one of the things I'm most proud about
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in this work is that we identify a solution a practical actionable solution that we can start to make a difference
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in people's lives welcome to the ripple effect the podcast that takes you on a journey through the
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minds of work and faculty I'm your host Dan Loney and in each episode we'll be
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diving deep into the inspiration behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton
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professors have conducted and exploring how their findings resonate with the world today we'll be covering a diverse
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range of topics bringing you the latest insights and knowledge that you can apply to your life into work so get
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ready to dive into new ideas with the ripple effect so Nancy you've done a lot of research
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on gender in the workplace how did it come about that the topic of female moral objectors ended up on your radar
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well Dan I've done a lot of work as you said over the years on both gender and
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on voicing issues in organizations in fact actually my first academic publication was called out on a limb and
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it was about women who were raising gender Equity issues in their organizations and what made them more
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willing to do so and we found that the the role that they were in actually conferred legitimacy
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for raising these issues so being in HR made more women more willing to raise gender Equity issues because they felt
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like that was part of their role and what happened was my student and co-author you know Flash Forward to
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2020. uh my student and co-author Tim was interested in Morality In organizations and when he came to talk
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to me about this project it was really a fabulous intersection of our interests my interests on gender and voice and his
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on uh moral objection and so you also found out that women in power are more likely to face
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retaliation when they voice ethical concerns more so than men in power can you break down that finding and what you
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believe accounts for the difference here sure um as you said we found that high-powered women when they raised
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ethical concerns experienced more retaliation than their their male counterparts and the reason that we
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found for this is that they were perceived as being out of control and what was really interesting about
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this for us is that a lot of the past research on gender assumes that one of the reasons that women get backlash is
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because they're they're perceived as not warm and friendly but we found actually
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it wasn't warmth perceptions that was the problem it was self-control and the
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reason for that is frankly people don't like moral objectors they they whether they're male
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or female people people think that moral objectors are seen as rocking the boat as violating expectations as disrupting
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things um and one of the things that's really interesting is that people think that
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moral objectors are often selfish actually um and and it's kind of interesting they
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feel like they're selfishly demonstrating their own moral superiority or you know putting their
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own ideological preferences onto other people or the organization in this case and you know actually a lot of
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the literature talks about how moral objectors are sometimes viewed as self-righteous or arrogant
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um and the perception is exacerbated by the idea that it somehow seems seen as morally inappropriate socially
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inappropriate that you are raising these objections right you're disrupting things you're you're making waves and so
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when moral objectors violate Expectations by by raising these concerns other people often think that
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they're they're doing this to advance their own moral agenda and there's
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something selfish about that um that costs uh the group something so let's take a moment and talk about
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this idea of perceived self-control what does it really mean in in this context yeah so self-control is uh what we mean
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by self-control is that it's either the ability or the lack of self-control is
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the inability to restrain those selfish or anti-social impulses right for the sake of what's perceived as best for the
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group so the kinds of things that we would ask is you know um does does Dan lack self-discipline is
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Dan bad at resisting temptation you know does Dan Act without thinking through Alternatives uh and what we find is that
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lower self-control we we actually did some supplementary analyzes where we find that lower self-control is is
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associated with perceptions of self more higher selfishness and lower other orientedness so you're you're not as
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concerned about others if you're seen as having low self-control so there seemed to be a variety of
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gender stereotypes at play here based on the work that you've done what are some
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of the strongest ones that tend to influence how women are perceived in the workplace
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yeah that's a really important question Dan I I think that some of the gender
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stereotypes that are really important when we think about women in the workplace or stereotypes around around
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other orientedness around communality right are we doing things on behalf of the group are we pro-social are we
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um you know are we uh you know in it for everyone and that plays out here as well in that
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it's related to perceptions of of self-control um but what what also you often see in
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many other uh types of work on gender at in the workplace is are the perceptions
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of warmth that women need to be warm and friendly you know you've seen or you've
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heard about how women need to smile more um and and that's sort of an expectation
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of women that they are that they are um uh more um more connected to others in the
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workplace and and that's really very hard oftentimes because it's it's an
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additional uh layer of responsibility that women have to really um engage with other people while
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they're having to be highly competent at their jobs at the same time and so what we had in this paper is is actually
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this additional expectation around self-control uh that that plays out I think in
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important ways uh how does retaliation show up in this context as well and can it tend to be
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subtle yeah so um retaliation was the dependent variable we looked at so we were looking
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at the consequences of raising moral concerns and how do people react to you and retaliation was the was what we
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looked at and retaliation can be it can take a lot of different forms it can be work related
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um you you could be demoted you know if if it's at an extreme case but it can
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also take less extreme forms and and you know social kind of Norm uh types of uh
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functions like you know people spreading gossip or rumors uh about the person or
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what have you um it also is important because retaliation occurs when people want to either
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silence discredit or discourage people from behaving the way that they're behaving in the future right so it's
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it's it's trying to maintain order and compliance in the face of um a behavior that's seen as problematic
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and so when we looked at retaliation in this paper and in this study we looked it in a couple of different ways so we
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we had a couple of studies where we which which were archival studies that were done in the field and they they
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asked people if they had experienced retaliation in a lot of different forms right so they it asked them about you
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know did you if you've ever experienced retaliation um you know because you raise health or
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safety concerns right or you raised issues around fraud um or you um you know engage in any kind
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of whistleblowing or or whether you uh you know you raise issues around equal opportunity or
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um you know some some of the items were around whether people had raised uh issues around sexual uh harassment or
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even disagreeing with management decisions right so it was even as broad as that and so in one of the the studies
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we we kind of we looked at those types of issues in some of the other studies we asked people whether so that study
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actually looked at whether you experienced retaliation we turned it around in some of our other studies and
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we asked people have you ever retaliated against somebody else right and so uh in
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the in those studies we asked things like did you retaliate again we gave them a scenario and we said did you
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retaliate against that that person or did you suggest that they were out of line or did you spread rumors or did you
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discourage this Behavior or did you indicate that that behavior was inappropriate so those are the types of
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of ways that we operationalized retaliation in in some of the other studies can you walk us through the
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Kevin and Kate experiment sure um so so one our fourth study in the paper that we published was uh as
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you say the Kevin and Kate experiment where we um we uh gave a um we gave participants
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uh a task where we asked them to brainstorm different ideas independently uh and we could said they could use the
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internet to Source ideas and then they would they were they were supposed to interact with a team a set of teammates
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to develop the ideas um and what happened was when they went to to interact with the teammates we had
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a um an artificial teammate Kevin or Kate uh and Kevin or Kate then um was either a high power person or an
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average power person and then um we we had Kevin or Kate say either I must point out that the moral problem
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a moral problem with this task and I can't complete it um asking users to use the internet to
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look up ideas could lead to plagiarism and this is a serious moral issue and and Must Be Stopped right so in one
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version Kevin or Kate said that in the other version Kevin or Kate said because it might come back to hurt uh
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the the platform and any participants in the study I have to point out there's a
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moral problem with the task and I can't complete it asking users to use the internet to look up ideas could lead to
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plagiarism which could put people on the platform at risk and and and this is a serious problem and must negatively it
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might negatively impact the platform and the workers or get us in trouble and it
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has to be stopped in order to protect the platform and its workers from unfair retribution so so as you see we had sort
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of this a moral objection in both cases but in the one case it was sort of what we call the standard frame and in the
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other case it was what we call the organizational frame where we're giving much more explanation and rationale
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about how it could hurt the organization and the people in the organization if we
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were to proceed with this problematic Behavior right and so um what we then did is we had coders we
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then had peop the the participants who received Kevin or Kate's moral objection
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we had them then respond um to Kevin or Kate and we coded their responses for whether they were they
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were retaliatory or not right and so um retaliatory messages were ones where they ended up scolding or disparaging or
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criticizing Kevin or Kate uh for their behavior um and and so like an example of one of
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our favorite quotes from the uh the responses was um you are a petulant little child you need
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to grow up and get a grip um so that was an example of a negative retaliers response
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uh a pause and then you know we also got we coded positive responses so some of the responses that that the uh Kevin or
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Kate received were ones that thanked them or condoned their their behavior um you know one of an example that was
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this is a really important Point Kevin or Kate thanks for bringing it up so you know we you know we we had a variety of
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ways people responded based on who the person was what their level of power was and whether they used an organizational
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frame or not and so that that interaction between those factors really led to quite a disparity in how people
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responded and are there ways where you can even reduce the potential for retaliation in
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some of these circumstances things that we found that was really important was when participant or when
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when Kevin or Kate used the organizational frame or uh where they kind of gave more of an explanation
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about the benefits to the organization and to the group retaliation was lowered across the board
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for men and for women the only people who did not experience higher levels of retaliation when they used a standard
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frame were the high-powered men so the high-powered men were able to just do the the sort of this is wrong
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and we shouldn't do it right lower powered men and women and even and even high power women needed to use the
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uh the organizational frame in order for them to experience lower levels of retaliation and be and and be more
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accepted in terms of what they were saying what particular recommendations then would you have for organizations
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themselves around that type of a remedy so Dan I think it's really important
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that when we find things like this that we don't put all of the burden on low-powered individuals or in this or in
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in this case certain groups of individuals like women um and so our recommendations actually
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are more um broad so what we would say is we encourage all moral objectors regardless of their gender or structural
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power to use an organizational frame when when raising moral objections it's
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going to make everybody uh sound more in control and it is going to really help ensure that gendered outcomes are
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reduced uh and and it really increases people's receptivity to your moral objection you know from you know across
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all all ends of the continuum the second thing I sorry I would suggest I would suggest uh is that we we train
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people with how to do this right we need to provide examples for uh employees to
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with how to how to frame set these types of moral objections and and to really um
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I guess third is to help employees really recognize their own bias and learn to reframe moral objections that
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they encounter right I mean I think we need to raise awareness that we are all doing this men and women are doing this
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right women were retaliating as as much as men were against high-powered women uh when they were framing things in this
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way right or not framing things uh with with an organizational frame and so you know we really need to
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um to kind of raise that awareness to help with debiasing um and and then again I I think that the
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last thing is just highlighting the benefits that moral objections can provide to organizations because as I
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started with you know people don't like moral objectors they feel like they're
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rocking the boat they feel like you know this is just um you know they're a sticky wheel and
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how do we how do we make people understand that raising moral objections is not just about pursuing you know a
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selfish agenda it's often about pursuing a selfless agenda and one that does
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benefit the organization as a whole so when you're thinking more broader scale when it comes to correcting these
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types of imbalances do you think it's better to focus on changing the system
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or changing the individual Behavior yeah that's a really tough one because I
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think that we have more leverage over individual behaviors often as individual actors right so you know as as a as a
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woman who is in a power position it's important to know that this is a tool that you can use right to level the
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playing field but again I think that to make systemic change we really need to do more and we need to raise that
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awareness at a broader level uh and so I think I think that it's both end quite frankly
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so what are some of the the other big questions that we need to look at right now around the topic of women in
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leadership so I actually think um there's a really interesting opportunity here Dan because what we we're at a
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place in our scholarship where we know a lot about the problems we've documented
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the problems lack of representation The Leaky pipeline the glass ceiling the glass cliff
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subtle forms of bias benevolent sexism lack of mentorship and sponsorship right like all of those are things that we
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know are problems but what we need more work on is or are solutions to those problems one of the
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things I'm most proud about uh in this work is that we we identify a solution a
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practical actionable solution that we can start to make a difference in people's lives and their effectiveness
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in organizations and so you know more work that examines women's careers more
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work that examines how we can get both men and women to be allies in addressing these types of issues I think that those
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are the opportunities that we have to really make a difference in terms of women's leadership
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Nancy thank you very much for your time today all the best thanks so much Dan always a pleasure
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