The nexus of ethics: many experts say a person's ethics on and off the job can't be separated—and there are ways to get a pretty clear picture of how a person really behaves

HR Magazine, August, 2005 by Linda Wasmer Andrews

You probably have heard it from coworkers: "What I do on my own time has nothing to do with my job. I draw a line between my personal life and what I do at work."

If there is such a line between ethics on and off the job, though, it may be fainter than assumed. Consider, for example, Harry Stonecipher, who had to resign as CEO of Boeing last spring after having an extramarital affair with a Boeing executive. Although the affair had not compromised Boeing's operational performance or financial condition, the company's chairman said in a prepared statement, "the facts reflected poorly on Harry's judgment and would impair his ability to lead the company."

Clearly, top-tier executives should take note of Stonecipher's spectacular fall. But what about the rest of us? Is there a relationship between personal ethics and business ethics, and, if so, what are its ramifications for hiring employees on every rung of the corporate ladder?

A number of ethicists and psychologists have begun challenging the cherished notion that we can keep our private selves and work selves separate. "We'd like to think there's a crisp line that divides the behaviors we do outside of work and those we engage in at work," says David Gebler, president of Working Values, a business ethics and training company in Sharon, Mass. But Gebler and others say the line is growing increasingly blurry.

The relationship between private life and business life is not just an abstract philosophical issue. More companies, looking at recent high-profile corporate scandals, are searching for ways to avoid becoming the next front-page debacle. For HR professionals, that creates pressure to take a candidate's ethics, both personal and business, into account when making decisions about hiring and promotion.

In a random survey of HR professionals conducted in May by the Society for Human Resource Management, more than four-fifths of 371 respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that organizations should take into account personal ethics and off-the-job behaviors when making hiring and promotion decisions. The online poll had a 5 percent margin of error.

"We certainly value family, religion and a hard-work ethic," says Denise Noel, director of quality and human resources at Dayton Freight Lines, a freight carrier in Dayton, Ohio. But she acknowledges that "what you do outside of work, we would probably never know. From the HR perspective, it would be very difficult to ascertain those things."

Yet there are clues--if you know where to look. Below, experts share their advice on using integrity interviews, background checks and personality tests to gauge the personal ethics of job candidates. First, though, what about the fundamental questions: Are personal ethics and business ethics really two sides of the same coin? Or are we comparing pennies and nickels?

Bedrooms and Boardrooms

Most of us would like to believe there's at least some separation between work and home. "My own view is that one's private life is private," says Dick Mason, a business professor and director of the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "I think that ought to be the prima-facie viewpoint."

Mason, for one, doesn't believe that private lapses such as cheating on a spouse necessarily indicate a greater propensity for cheating, lying and stealing on the job. "I've certainly seen a lot of very successful and, I think, quite ethical executives who appeared to have an infidelity in their personal lives," says Mason. "As far as I was concerned, that was none of my business. And in those situations that I'm aware of, the personal infidelity hadn't flowed over to affect their business life."

However, "if you're going to cheat on your wife, who are you not going to cheat on?" asks Robert Hogan, former chair of the psychology department at the University of Tulsa and president of Hogan Assessment Systems, based in Tulsa, Okla., and Jacksonville, Fla. "Every guy I know who fools around is also a liar and a cheat in other ways. You just can't depend on them."

Hogan is the author of over 200 scholarly books, chapters and articles as well as developer of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), a widely used, business-oriented personality test. He says the research data are clear on one point: "If you get work colleagues or subordinates to describe a person, and then you get the spouse and neighbors to describe the person, they all see the same individual."

When it comes to bad behavior. Hogan says there's an intrinsic link between embezzling, on one hand, and marital infidelity, public drunkenness, traffic tickets, fighting, vandalism and not paying one's personal bills, on the other. "All these things involve breaking the rules, and they're all motivated by hostility toward or disregard for authority."

The Science of Misbehavior

Indeed, a vast body of research shows that there are unifying themes in people's behavior--or misbehavior, as the case may be.

Psychologically speaking, a trait is a broad personality disposition that is relatively consistent across situations and generally stable over time. For the past 40 years, Marvin Zuckerman, a professor emeritus in the psychology department at the University of Delaware, has been studying something he calls the sensation-seeking trait. People who score high in this trait tend to act impulsively without thinking. They're driven to seek excitement and new experiences, and they're often willing to take risks in order to satisfy those needs.