Reconciling Competing Tensions in Ethical Systems

Moral Awareness

Our analysis, based on a largely unfettered access to West Point, showed the breadth and depth of the ethics system West Point both formally and informally employs. The key systemic finding that seems to beget other critical subfindings and meso themes was an organizational mind oriented toward an acute moral awareness (Rest, 1986; Weick & Roberts, 1993). We found evidence of this moral awareness (Butterfield, Trevino, & Weaver, 2000) at the individual level up through the organizational level. Indicators of this moral awareness were found both in visible symbols and statements along with more subtle communication patterns; as such, these indicators reflect the artifactual, espoused, and taken-for-granted levels of organizational culture (Schein, 2004). For instance, the words, “Duty, Honor, and Country” are permanently painted on the bleachers that surround the parade field. Because the parade field is a central area on the grounds of West Point, it appeared that cadets almost had to try to avoid seeing this outward and overt symbolism. In the chapel there was a plaque with the “Cadet Prayer” that mentions the need for the strength “. . . to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.” As far as communication patterns, the dialogue with one senior cadet illustrated that the gravity of honor and character moved beyond classroom lecture.

I think you can notice the change because, if you sit around with drinks at West Point long enough, you’ll end up talking about something either that happened in Iraq that you heard about or you always end up talking about some sort of ethical dilemma. It may not be right away, but it’s going to come up eventually. When I go home and I go visit my buddies at school, it never happens, it never comes up. You always want to continue this debate, so you’ll develop it outside of the hour-long classroom.

Another cadet remarked, “Once we go back to our barracks, a lot of us will sit down and just kind of talk to each other and we’ll say, ‘what do you think about this or what would you do differently?’”

In our analysis, we found it difficult to overstate this exaggerated awareness. It was precisely this awareness that allowed many of the complexities embedded within an ethical system to be exposed. Consequentially, this exposure encouraged debate, dialogue, and reflection surrounding these complex and, often, competing forces. Moreover, this awareness contributed to what Nielsen (1996) referred to as triple loop learning, which Dufresne (2004) identified as instrumental in fostering the deep intellectual and emotional attachment to a code or ethical system. As opposed to single or double loop learning, triple loop learning requires an individual to examine the influence of traditions, systems, culture, and social structure in the decision making and sensemaking process. It is at this level of learning that the inconsistencies and conflicts are often uncovered to include conflicting values, beliefs, and allegiances. Triple loop learning is particularly valuable since it can juxtapose ethical values in relation to an organization’s traditions, culture, and social structures (Nielsen, 1996).

An interesting managerial implication also emerges in a manner not always associated with ethical development and that is the practice of environmental scanning. We found environmental scanning to drive an acutely aware individual and probably worked against the propensity for insularity. Framing environmental scanning in this way is novel as it is usually applied in the field of competitive strategy (Chen & Hambrick, 1995). A lack of environmental scanning has been tied to organizational decline and, eventual, ruin (Amankwah-Amoah & Debrah, 2010).

This dominant logic also appears to generalize from firm competitiveness to organizational morality. At West Point, an organizational and individual imperative was to scan the environment for ethical and moral successes and failures. For instance, most cadets were encouraged or required to read the New York Times on a daily basis. These news reports and analyses from the external environment as reported in the New York Times served as an ethical environmental scanning tool. Indeed, the morning news became the topic of several ethical training events held later in the day or week. Thus, ethical environmental scanning seemed to contribute to an amplifying loop where moral awareness encouraged scanning, which enhanced awareness, and so on.

With the primacy of awareness in place, several intriguing theoretical advancements and extensions are offered here. Notably, environmental scanning, usually housed in the strategy domain, may inform the ethics arena as well. Indeed, “ethical environmental scanning” could raise moral awareness at all levels within the organization and, as such, affect firm or organizational survival as much, or more so, than its more dominant counterpart of strategic environmental scanning (Amankwah-Amoah & Debrah, 2010). This notion of ethical environmental scanning and its concomitant relationships with moral awareness and triple-loop learning, especially within the context of ethical systems, needs further explication. In addition, we offer some theoretical extensions regarding the notion of moral awareness, itself. For instance, a preponderance of research on moral decision making assumes a process orientation where the process begins with moral awareness and the identification of the moral issue (Ferrell & Gresham, 1985; Hunt & Vitell, 1986; Reynolds, 2006; Trevino, 1986). Embedded in this logic is that while many may engage in immoral behavior because they intend to, others simply do not recognize the moral aspects of the context and/or decision point. Maybe most important, much of the extant literature presumes that moral awareness along with moral imagination are individual constructs, whereas the individual recognizes that a moral problem exists in a situation and that it begins with a person’s recognition of ethical aspects of a problem (Butterfield et al., 2000; Rest, 1986). Interestingly, we find here and throughout much of our follow-on findings that moral awareness may deserve some attention as an organizational construct. Put differently, there are several process, structural, and programmatic initiatives that an organization can launch to influence moral awareness at the individual level. Thus we offer some challenges to recent theory development in this regard. Namely, there are some endogenous variables that affect moral awareness at the individual level and they could be driven by organizational mindfulness and purpose. Hence the ethical decision-making process may begin before moral awareness and the drivers of this heightened awareness deserve more attention.

As strong as the moral awareness was, we found several cognitive and affective contradictions at work within the West Point ethical system. The fact that these contradictions and competing tensions were exposed in the first place is a strong indication of the triple loop learning taking place at West Point. We highlight below some of these powerful competing forces that span the individual to the organizational. By exploring the tensions (Poole & Van de Ven, 1989), we highlight how this organization has faced the challenge of developing and maintaining its ethical system. In most cases, we share the ethical and operational reconciliation of these values that occurred at the individual, team, and organizational level.

More Versus Fewer Opportunities

One of the first themes to emerge from our informants was the contradiction between the common societal approaches to decreasing unethical conduct versus West Point’s approach. In general, there was recognition by West Point officials that incoming cadets are products of the broad society and, as such, are socialized to approach ethical decision making in a certain manner (Gharajedaghi, 1985). For instance, one senior officer who advised the Commandant of Cadets (akin to a Provost) remarked that

West Point gets a microcosm of America, good, bad, and indifferent. Don’t get me wrong: just like many other good schools, we’ve got high qualifications to get in, but we still get a random sample of America. We probably don’t get some of the best and brightest because they don’t choose to join the military. And we probably do get some of the more interested ones because we are uniquely military. But we take just who comes [assuming they are qualified and admitted].

After some reflection, he noted that some of the approaches used at West Point “fight against the values [and approaches] of our society.” This contradiction and tension became most evident when we asked one senior officer involved in values education how they limited or reduced opportunities to lie, cheat, or steal. Indeed, it is the reduction of opportunities to engage in unethical behavior that is the dominant logic both in political policy formulation (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley), operational practice (e.g., three signatures for an expense report), and ethical (White & Lam, 2000) and pedagogical theory (e.g., faculty taking steps to limit opportunities for students to cheat; Hutton, 2006). In response to this societal trend, this Lieutenant Colonel remarked, “This is about more temptation. Not less. Temptation is a good thing. The Superintendent [akin to a University President] wants more temptation for our leaders here, not less. He wants more decision points.” In follow-on discussions, a commonly held belief was that more decision-points and temptation opportunities allowed actors to practice decision making and acting ethically. Without this practice, cadets and officers reasoned, individuals would make more mistakes with fewer opportunities. Increased temptation took many forms in the West Point system, including the lack of locks on cadets’ dorm rooms, the common practice of leaving valuables unattended, the use of take-home and unproctored exams, and the entrusting of cadets to manage discipline and training issues internally. Of course, this embracing of temptation contradicts legal and conventional notions of reducing unethical behavior aimed at limiting temptation and opportunities to lie, cheat, or steal.

From the perspective of the administrators and faculty with whom we spoke, the guiding principle was that affording cadets with more opportunities for temptation while they were in school would give them more practice facing dilemmas after they left West Point. To the administrators—many of whom had served in combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan—the stakes for the cadets were relatively low. These were not life-and-death decisions for the cadets; these were decisions where, for example, if a cadet chose the “harder right” and not cheat on a closed book take-home exam she would perhaps fail an academic course and if she chose the “easier wrong” and cheated, the cadet may be separated from the Academy and need to continue her academic career elsewhere. From the cadet perspective, however, they saw the stakes and demands as being very high. Cadets commonly work 18-hr days, between their heavy course load, responsibilities in the cadet chain of command, and required athletics. Furthermore, all cadet performance at West Point—including, for example, course grades and performance in physical fitness tests and leadership roles—are evaluated, and these evaluations are factored into their class rank. The class rank, in turn, determines everything from their first duty station and their branch of service to their order of merit within each rank for the rest of their career. The cadets commonly referred to how their friends at civilian universities lived in a safe bubble where they faced no serious consequences for their actions. So while the cadets were not faced with the truly high stakes ethical decisions they were bound to face postgraduation, their relative perception was that the stakes they faced were as high as they possibly could be.

The systemic approach to increasing temptation at West Point is aligned with the academic research on the construct. One approach to temptation views the use of temptation-resisting self-control as both a balancing of competing values and as a form of strength depletion (Baumeister, 2002). That is, one is tempted when a short-term value (e.g., fulfilling the easier wrong) competes against a long-term value (e.g., fulfilling the harder right); at West Point, the heightened moral awareness detailed above raises the salience of the long-term value of ethicality. Also, Baumeister (2002) characterizes resisting temptation in terms of strength depletion, where the more one fights temptation, the weaker one becomes to resist the next temptation. Taken on its face, then, systematically increasing temptation may lead to momentary weakness that makes an unethical choice more likely. However, as Muraven, Baumeister, and Tice (1999) found, just as one can increase physical strength through repeated practice, one can increase ego strength through repeated temptation. The West Point approach of increasing temptation, then, fits with the more strategic view of building strength rather than the prevailing short-term organizational view of avoiding temptation.

Another approach to temptation in the literature also highlights the wisdom of the West Point systemic tension of increasing opportunities for wrongdoing. In their research, Fishbach, Friedman, and Kruglanski (2003) found that temptation to yield to proximate pleasures actually triggers the activation of long-term goals. A dieter, for example, who is tempted with a piece of chocolate cake is more likely to activate the dieting goal; over time, repeated temptation can work to automate the activation of the long-term goal to the point that the long-term goal becomes even more dominant. While the process is different, the outcome, then, is similar to the strength-building approach of Muraven et al. (1999), where more temptation builds the ability to resist. Again, this line of thinking supports the wisdom of the West Point systemic approach.

Our findings here regarding temptation and the creation of more ethical decision points furthermore adds to our understanding of the already well-researched Kohlbergian model of cognitive moral development (Kohlberg, 1969, 1984). Kohlbergians and neo-Kohlbergians have already posited that development, as seen in increasingly complexified moral stages or schemas, is facilitated with more moral conflict (Dawson, 2002). Of importance here is that the West Point system not only seems to aim for greater quantities of temptation and conflict but also for greater quality. More specifically, West Point anchors much of its temptations and decision points around the Cadet Leadership Development System (CLDS). The essence of the CLDS system is first to promote followership during the Plebe or freshman year. After that, each cadet from sophomore to senior is responsible for the military, leadership, athletic and physical, and academic performance of cadets assigned to them. Unlike many or most jobs that undergraduates at other universities may take that emphasize the individual contributor role, cadets at West Point, from sophomore through senior, manage the entire performance spectrum of small teams or units (e.g., sophomores usually are assigned one or two Plebes) to larger departments (e.g., seniors may lead hundreds of subordinate cadets). Hence it is the decision making under leadership contexts that may offer the greatest path to moral development. Moreover, the timing of this leadership-temptation-decision-point experiment probably occurs at an opportune time. Generally, it is during these college years that self-concepts are solidifying and notions of leadership to include ethical leadership are starting to coalesce (Hooker, 2004). Consequently, it may be the interaction of both the quality of the intervention and the timing of the intervention that is instrumental.

It is important to realize that both the process and the finding itself are noteworthy. The process required individuals to realize that a contradiction existed between their subculture and the larger culture in which they were embedded. After this tension surfaced, debate, dialogue, and introspection occurred that juxtaposed these two forces and compared benefits and drawbacks. This tension was reconciled by adhering to a counterfactual and countercultural approach of increasing, as opposed to limiting, opportunities to lie, cheat, or steal. It began, however, with the identification of this tension.

Moral Clarity Versus Moral Imagination

The next competing set of forces we found were never fully reconciled. Rather, they were allowed to coexist. The first force is, coincidentally, also a first from a cadet’s temporal perspective. Incoming cadets are quickly and strongly introduced to the West Point Honor Code. At 12 words, it reads, “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Remarkably, every cadet that we approached, freshmen through senior, could recite this code verbatim. At 12 words, the code is unequivocal and clear. It is difficult to misinterpret and it is difficult to misapply. To help live by the West Point Honor Code, we found the use of a decision-heuristic. Heuristics are well studied, particularly within industries involving pilots, air traffic controllers, and emergency personnel (Klein, 1999). One of the primary purposes of decision-making heuristics is to provide mental clarity in times of operational (and mental) chaos (Klein, 1999). The Honor heuristic that we uncovered served a similar purpose only in a moral setting; the use of the heuristic provided ethical and moral clarity in times of confusion. Every cadet we interviewed could recite verbatim this moral heuristic entitled the Three Rules of Thumb. On approaching a difficult ethical decision, cadets are encouraged to process the Three Rules of Thumb, which read,

Embedded in these rules are deontological principles; the memorization of these rules provide a strong force of moral clarity to reduce variance in the decision-making process. Interestingly, a powerful force of fear seemed to accompany this force of moral clarity. The strong, severe, and serious facial impressions that accompanied the moral clarity of the code also corresponded to a fear-based language that included words like, “kicked out,” “separated,” “booted,” or “dishonor.” While this language and fear-based sentiment seemed to exist among all grades and levels, it seemed to wane in strength as a cadet proceeded from a freshman to the upper classes. In response to our question on why most cadets refrain from cheating, a cadet responded,

It’s kind of crazy, but, at first, it was fear. Fear of getting caught and fear of getting kicked out. But then things changed. I just don’t think about it anymore. I don’t think of cheating and I’m not afraid of getting kicked out. I am a junior now and I’ve moved on. There were so many opportunities to cheat, lie, and even steal. You know most people don’t lock their doors here . . .

While moral clarity appeared to come first, temporally, during the socialization process, an eventual developmental shift occurred that stressed moral imagination. This moral imaginative cognitive process seemed to operate simultaneously with the moral clarity approach; sometimes surging and at other times waning depending on the context. One midlevel officer relatively new to West Point from a Darden MBA at the University of Virginia remarked about the progression from moral clarity to moral creativity:

It’s trying to get beyond that dualistic model of, “there is right, there is wrong.” We need to move a little bit further down the spectrum and see how we do with these folks. I love the discussion-based classes. We opened up, the same way, with real-world examples. We talked about what happened out at the Air Force Academy last year, ² which was some of the materials that were given to us to use in this course; what happened to them in high school; and we also discussed what happened in Samarra with the young lieutenant and his sergeant who pushed the two Iraqis into the water and the battalion commander who covered it up. How much did he know? Both were West Point graduates. How did that happen, given that they came out of this institution? And challenging them . . .

While this is an exposition or an explanation of a pedagogical approach to encourage moral imagination, it does not provide firsthand evidence. However, we found such support of moral imagination while talking to a cadet who had recently failed his English class and was required to give up a majority of his summer vacation to attend remedial English. His case was particularly noteworthy due to the notion of relative deprivation; losing summer vacation to live in relatively Spartan conditions was particularly troubling to this young man. He felt pressure to pass the course although he knew with about 6 weeks remaining in the course that his chances of doing so were declining. He noted that it “would have been easy to cheat since everybody takes the same English course with almost identical syllabi.” Still, he refused to compromise his character and his response displays characteristics of a moral imagination where short-term and long-term consequences are examined by the decision maker.

If you do something once, it is easier to repeat the process. So if I did cheat that one time, I may have found it easier to cheat more consistently. And if you cheat you’re taking away from yourself and I wouldn’t have learned what I needed to learn about English comp, which would’ve impacted my future ability to communicate as an Army Officer.

Another cadet, a rising senior, imagined how cheating would affect his future relationships in the Army and his ability to be productive as an Army officer.

I am going to see a lot of these guys in the Army and if they know a time when I reported something that wasn’t true, it’s going to stick in their mind that I lied, or did something on a 10 point assignment. So when I get there, as an infantry platoon leader somewhere and someone looks at me and says, “I need you to give me a report on this,” and I give him the report and he has in the back of his head, “you know, five years ago this guy did [with emphasis] lie about a quiz’ and that there’s no trust there. No matter how big or how small, it seems like the small stuff can even work against you more. There are a lot of times when you look at a guy and you say, ‘is he going to help me on later in life or is he going to stiff me on something, something so small or big.’

This cadet’s remark is noteworthy because it illustrates a powerful moral imagination. He projects himself in the future and tries to imagine how current behavior may influence future interactions and job performance. Also, he displays some moral creativity by imagining how “small” instances of unethical conduct may lead to “big” or outsized consequences. Here, we see a moral creativity dimension take precedence over the moral clarity and fear-based approach. Unlike the moral clarity tack, moral imagination expands variance in the reasoning and decision-making process.

Another powerful tool that seemed to encourage moral imagination was the combination of symbols with role models. For instance, on the West Point campus there are statues of former leaders such as George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dormitories and academic buildings are named after famous alumni who fought or led in the service of the nation. These include (General Robert, E.) Lee and (General John, J.) Pershing barracks and (President Ulysses, S.) Grant Hall. The physical and immovable manifestations of role models motivate cadets, but it also sparks their imagination to aspire to a higher standard of conduct and leadership. Reflecting on this, one civil service manager, 15 years removed from his graduation from West Point reflected on these statues and said that “he never wanted to let the Long Gray Line [living and dead alumni] down by compromising his honor.”

Consistent with the previous theme of more versus less opportunities, we see the identification of two critical forces in tension—moral clarity and moral imagination. To be able to leverage their heightened moral awareness through the use of readily accessible decision heuristics indicated the degree of clarity with which cadets claimed to be able to approach ethical dilemmas. To be able to bystand themselves and see how their decisions and development today would impact their ethical leadership later indicated the degree of imagination cadets brought to ethical dilemmas. Furthermore, we provide some evidence that while neither force is reconciled against each other, they are allowed and encouraged to coexist. Importantly, there was a general sense that cadets needed to master both and that the nuances of the particular situation such as amount of time allowed to make a decision, the complexity of the variables, and the diversity of stakeholders would determine whether the cadet would use a moral clarity or moral imagination approach to solving the ethical issue.

Since this tension invoked an essence of moral judgment, it is important to integrate our findings with Kohlberg’s (1969) and the neo-Kohlbergian research on moral reasoning. Kohlberg and his associates theorize that individuals, through their own reflection processes, progress through a series of six stages of moral analysis (Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983). Our qualitative findings indicate variance in the cognitive moral development of the cadets over the four class-years. Some cadets gave voice to a fear-based motivation to behave ethically, evidencing a lower stage of development, while other cadets spoke of the principles that help them decide what is right and wrong. There was clearly a developmental nature to this variation; more junior cadets spoke about making moral choices out of the fear of being caught behaving immorally, while more senior cadets spoke about abiding by generalizable moral principles.

Interestingly, our findings may offer some additional theoretical advancement to the neo-Kohlbergian approach (cf. Rest, Narvaez, Thoma, & Bebeau, 2000). The first departure centers on the force of moral imagination, which introduced a temporal aspect to moral judgment. While Krebs and Denton (2005) moved the focus of discussing and developing morality from the third person past tense to the first person past tense, we found at West Point that sometimes the question was not only, “What is the right thing to do now?” but it was also, “What will have been the right thing later, given the leader I aspire to be?” Imagining oneself in an ideal future state may be yet another avenue for increased cognitive moral development.

Second and, importantly, Kohlberg’s model assumes progression through stages. While some claim there is no evidence of stage reversals (Dawson, 2002), others argue that situational variables affect the dominance of one stage over another (Baucus & Beck-Dudley, 2005; Krebs & Denton, 2005), where one who has attained a higher order stage may revert in practice to a lower order stage to reason through a given situation. The multiple stages or schemas (Rest et al., 2000) salient in many of our cadet informants provide an interesting window on the question of the stability or volatility of stage advancement. Specifically, although most freshmen-aged adults tend to be at Kohlberg’s Stage 3 (Dawson, 2002), where fulfilling role expectations is dominant (Krebs & Denton, 2005), the freshmen in our sample almost universally appear to reside in Stage 1’s need to avoid punishment and rule breaking. Given the focus during Plebe year on followership and compliance, the finding of a pull toward a lower level of reasoning isn’t necessarily surprising (Baucus & Beck-Dudley, 2005; Krebs & Denton, 2005). In more senior cadets, however, we found that moral reasoning could be influenced by both imagination and universal ethical principles (Stage 6) while still simultaneously being influenced by rules and punishment (Stage 1). This notion of “straddling stages” simultaneously seemed to be an interesting theoretical extension within our study. Krebs and Denton (2005) found that, unlike “strong” situations where there is a taken-for-granted moral interpretation, “weak” situations invited people at different developmental levels to interpret them differently. In the present study, not only did we also find such between-person variability, but we also found within-person variability. Put differently, more senior cadets, having developed and while engaging in a higher order of moral stage still recalled and acknowledged, at least in part, a punitive component to their ethical decision making.

Loyalty Versus Honor

Perhaps the most evident venue in which competing tensions surfaced involved the nontoleration clause of the West Point Honor Code: a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The nontoleration clause, unique to West Point, requires cadets to turn in classmates if they see or witness a violation of the clause. The code views toleration of unethicality as a coequal form of unethicality along with lying, cheating, and stealing. Failure to turn in another for a violation of the Honor Code can and often does result in separation for both the violator and the tolerating party. Predictably, this generates a collision between two seemingly irreconcilable and potent forces—friendship and ethics. Many institutions, including West Point’s sister service academy, the United States Naval Academy—whose honor code does not include a nontoleration clause—are reluctant to reconcile these forces.

And while West Point includes a nontoleration clause, it is not often followed and many that we talked to said it is a frequently violated part of the Honor System. For instance, we interviewed a newly minted Army major who just arrived to teach Mathematics at the Academy. During an emotional portion of the interview, he admitted to witnessing cadets cheat back when he was a cadet. Rather than bring it to the attention of the Honor board, he chose to remain silent. He said,

It wasn’t so much about them, it was more about me [with emphasis]. I wanted to be liked. Wanted to be popular. I guess what I wanted, in a tough environment like this [West Point] is that I just wanted to be accepted. If I told on them, I’d lose all of that.

As evidenced by this sentiment, reconciliation of these competing forces is not always successful. At other times, we found this cognitive and emotional struggle realized. Two separate female cadets shared the feeling that “true” friends do not put others in compromising situations. Consider this remark, “committing an honor violation and have someone else be around to see it is not a fair position to put somebody in,” or “the way cadets are around here is that if they’re your friend, they won’t put you in that position and that’s what I’ve found.”

Cadets we interviewed argued that living and abiding by an Honor system did not collide against their friendships. Rather, ethical living enhanced, not detracted from, the interpersonal relationship. One junior cadet noted,

The Honor Code and system has really changed our friendship. He and I trust each other one hundred percent. And we have an understanding between each other that anything that we say to each other, anything we do . . . you know, it’s all about the little things like he may want to borrow my car. That if he crashes it, or if he dings it, he’ll let me know, he’ll tell me. We have a deeper level of trust that doesn’t exist with my friends back home because he and I have learned certain things about the right way to live.

Described in this way, living and working within an ethical system improved the quality of friendships. Interestingly, we saw the mutually reinforcing nature of the tensions or forces in which a young man said it was his friendships that influenced his ethics. This is noteworthy and is evidence of counterfactual and unconventional thinking along with the novel reframing of the ethics–loyalty relationship. Oftentimes, loyalty, friendship, and high moral standards are seen as competing, mutually exclusive, forces as noted in phrases such as “I would never turn in a friend.” The counterintuitive and counterfactual framing repositions this in a manner in which these two tensions are seen as complementary, as opposed to, contradictory forces. No single statement better epitomizes this phenomenon when one cadet remarked that “a good friend, a true friend, would never put me in a position where I would have to choose between our friendship and doing the right thing.”

This informant below offers a compelling glimpse of some other forces mentioned above including opportunities for temptation and awareness. Importantly, this young man knew that he was about to violate the West Point Honor code. He turned to friends for help prior to his decision.

Well, it’s an honor violation to sign out somewhere and then blow post [leave campus], to say you are signing out on Walking Privileges down to Highland Falls [college town outside gates of West Point], knowing you’re going to New York City for instance . . . I had a friend of mine who was going to pick up his girlfriend in Newburgh at the airport there and he was talking about, it was during the Academic year, during the week, so he didn’t have privileges to do that, and he was talking about how he could just sign out on walking privileges and then go there and, we’re like, “Listen to what you’re saying. If you do that, that’s an honor violation, and think about this . . . there are ways. It’s better to just blow post and take your chances . . . it’s better to take a regulations hit than to compromise your honor.” And he was like, “yeah, you’re right I need to think about what I’m doing here.” At West Point we play on Watch Your Buddy. By doing that we can preempt any honor cases. ³

This part of our analysis illustrates the application of many forces to include awareness, teamwork, cohesion, loyalty, temptation, and integrity. Again, a heightened and acute moral awareness is present that allows an actor to dissect these forces. In addition, it also illustrates that these competing tensions are not always reconciled according to the ethical code or system. We do, however, illustrate that reconciliation of what many consider mutually exclusive forces like integrity and loyalty is, indeed, possible and probably preferred via reframing through double and triple loop learning processes.

An interesting practical prescription surfaced that showcases how an organization can set purposeful conditions where values are exposed and, possibly, harmonized. Specifically, West Point employed rites and rituals to expose and enact such values as loyalty and honor and courage. This is not surprising since Islam and Zyphur (2009) theorized that rituals can serve simultaneous ends, such as organizational enhancement where the merits of the organization are emphasized and organizational integration where attributes, values, and emotional affects are shared amongst members. Extending this reasoning, it appeared that West Point, on specific occasions, attempted to link the rites of enhancement with the rites of integration. For example, during a visit to West Point, we learned that Paul Bucha, a West Point graduate and Medal of Honor winner, was coming to speak to the newest class of freshman. This is done almost annually to the incoming class approximately 6 weeks into the socialization process. During his speech, he talks about the values of duty, honor, and country and is a living example of the courage and bravery needed to earn the nation’s highest battlefield honor. This is given in a group setting in Eisenhower Hall, which sits the entire class of approximately 1,100 Plebes. At the end, the Plebe class recites The Corps—a refrain that is known to all cadets and alumni alike and speaks to a brotherhood/sisterhood. Here, in this venue and through ritual, the tensions of honor and loyalty are mutually on display. But the ceremonial act is played in such a form and fashion to link or show that the institution is loyal, focused, and aligned toward the highest notions of honor and courage. At this moment, the ritual spotlights that loyalty and honor can and should coexist. Understanding that rituals are orchestrated and involve purposeful manipulation (Islam & Zyphur, 2009), practitioners may be able to craft or blend situations, settings, and contexts into a ritual where values typically viewed as competing tensions are shown as complementary.

Our findings in this study may offer extensions to an emerging theoretical construct—peer justice. Traditional justice research tends to focus on supervisory or authority figures. Peer justices aims to understand the shared perceptions regarding how individuals work together within the same work unit while not having formal authority over each other and, by extension, judge the fairness in which they treat each other (Cropanzano, Li, & Benson, 2011). Believed to affect important outcome variables such as task performance (Li, Cropanzano, & Benson, 2007), scholars suggest “more research is needed on fairness perceptions that concern how peers treat one another” (Cropanzano et al., 2011, p. 568) and that “future research should also examine the antecedents of peer justice, with the hope that doing so would bring fairer work units” and “the literature on ethical leadership offers some interesting” avenues to better understand this phenomenon (Cropanzao et al., 2011, p. 588).

Specifically, our study provides some evidence that could advance peer justice theory. Namely, it appears that organizational structures, systems, and processes, such as a nontoleration clause, could serve as a compelling antecedent of peer justice. At least in the setting here, it appears that this organizational policy, of nontoleration, engenders or encourages higher levels of peer justice. Perhaps the driving force here is the notion of a level playing field. However, a nuanced and sophisticated understanding and implementation of nontoleration may be appropriate as a tension exists, as mentioned above, between nontoleration as a mode to fairness and justice or, conversely, nontoleration as a drive of a “police-like” state. Of course, our findings also appear to answer the call regarding the influence and evidence of ethical leadership in promoting or inhibiting peer justice. Specifically, the primacy and purposefulness of ethical leadership seemed to drive psychological safety among peers (Edmondson, 1999) which, in turn, created stronger, richer friendships along with a high regard for peer justice. Hence, we provide initial supporting evidence that the presence of both ethical leadership and organizational policies and processes, such as nontoleration, heavily influence the presence and formation of peer justice.

Exposure Versus Secrecy; Learning Versus Expediency

Until now, most of our phenomenological inquiry has been directed at the individual or interpersonal level. In our inductive process, we realized there would be a certain level of intrigue in both academic and practitioner camps regarding how the organization responds to ethical setbacks. Indeed, we found this to be one of the more interesting phenomena that we uncovered.

As mentioned earlier, most ethical systems are prone to failure (Cleek & Leonard, 1998; Mathews, 1987; Schwartz, 2000). Those failures can be either sporadic, individual failures or more systemic breakdowns. West Point has experienced both. Despite heavy emphasis, training, and a rather severe consequence for not operating within the boundaries of the ethical system, every semester there are some cadets who violate the Honor Code. While these individual lapses are disconcerting, much more egregious are systemic breakdowns in the functioning of the ethical system. One of the most notable systemic breakdowns that involved direct Congressional scrutiny was the 1976 West Point cheating scandal. In this scandal, a required Electrical Engineering course, EE 304, was the backdrop. A historically difficult course, EE 304 required a “take-home” exam (consistent with more vs. less temptation tension), and the answers were subsequently passed around the junior West Point class. More than 150 cadets were separated for honor violations relating from this incident (see the 1981 Harvard Business School case “West Point: The cheating incident” by Schlesinger and Zambello for more details on the incident).

The response to this incident offers some counterintuitive, sophisticated, and reflective learning at the organizational level. In corporate and crisis management circles, it is common practice to try to move beyond the scandal as quickly as possible akin to a collective mind that is encouraged to forget (Clair & Dufresne, 2005). In fact, many of the corporate contacts that we interviewed regarding this question mentioned common practices such as “admit no wrong doing,” “settle out of court,” “to sweep under the rug,” or an organizational imperative “to move beyond the public embarrassment as quick and as fast as possible.” Compare these forces of forced forgetting, secrecy, and ignoring with the comments made by a Lieutenant Colonel who was involved in the supervision of the West Point honor system.

I think one of the indicators of a successful program is, today in the Army, we still identify the unethical behavior and it becomes front-page news. While yes, it’s front-page news, the prison scandal in Iraq, for example, the issue is, when you put that in perspective of all the things the Army is doing, it’s still a small minority of our actions. We were aghast here when a West Point graduate and a peer of mine was the battalion commander who had the soldiers who pushed the two Iraqis off the bridge. But I’m glad we’re aghast, and I’m glad we identified that as an ethical violation. Because if we were to overlook that stuff, our system wouldn’t work. It’s not good press, but it still needs to be front-page stuff to say, “That’s wrong.” And when it makes even the back page, I think that’s a problem that we’re not doing as well as we should. Because I think we need to be the ones who raise our hands and say, “That’s wrong, and we’re not going to tolerate it” the most.

Both the 1976 cheating scandal and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal invoke almost all indicators of a true crisis. A crisis, like the ones experienced at West Point, are damaging because of the intensive media and public scrutiny that can undermine the survival of the institution at its worst and damage its legitimacy and public trust, at the least (Caldwell & Karri, 2005; Lindenmeier, Schleer, & Pricl, 2012). Despite the conventional motif of attempting to exit the crisis stage immediately, West Point, in general, adopts what some researchers define as a hyper-resilient stance (Dufresne & Clair, 2008). Hyper-resilience involves reframing mistakes and problems as opportunities for intense growing and learning that enable the organization to “become better than before” (Dufresne & Clair, 2008, p. 201). This deeply reflective learning orientation involves intensive engagement, intellectual and emotional honesty and maturity, and a willingness to openly and transparently share opinions, beliefs, and attitudes (Dufresne & Clair, 2008). On four separate visits to West Point, we found organizational behavior that conformed to these prescriptions: almost 35 years later, West Point is still talking about the 1976 cheating scandal as if it were “front-page news.” Several of our interviewees raised the example of the West Point graduates who were involved in the murder of two Iraqis by pushing them off a bridge in Samarra. The dominant logic is that failing to continue to expose and discuss the cheating scandal put the organization at risk of repeating the same behavior. The corollary is commonsensical to many that we interviewed—ignoring ethical breakdowns, especially systemic breakdowns, increases the likelihood that the same or similar mistakes will be repeated. Thus we find that between these competing tensions and forces of secrecy and openness, the forces of transparency and exposure often dominated.

Perhaps the best and most visible emphasis of learning openly from previous mistakes is the prevalent and widespread use of “Cadets X and Y” cases. We found one pamphlet entitled that Hip Pocket Values Education Guide (2004) that included several X/Y cases. X/Y cases are anonymized actual events that occurred at West Point and involve real-life ethical issues that cadets faced at West Point or in the Army. These X/Y cases became a learning platform during training. Below is an actual case lifted from the Hip Pocket guide:

Cadet Doe and his buddies Smith and Jones are sophomores who, without taking leave, left post one night and went out drinking. The trip appeared to be a success (to the cadets) until they returned to West Point, just before TAPS [bed check]. On their way across Central Area, the Officer-in-Charge (OC), Captain Strac, noticed the three cadets talking loudly and walking with apparently great difficulty. Upon approaching them it was clearly evident they were intoxicated and the OC asked them what they had been drinking. Cadet Doe replied that they had been drinking Coke, when in fact they had all been drinking rum and Coke.

By forcing the discussion, we find the use of several complex forces at work to include moral imagination and awareness. More than anything, however, we include this as some face evidence that mistakes are not avoided, discarded, or ignored. Instead, they are used and mined for further ethical and leader development. In this particular case, questions followed asking cadets to reflect on the definition of equivocation, or the telling of only a partial truth. Then it prodded the cadets to think how the Three Rules of Thumb could be used to help shape a cadet’s response. The openness with which West Point discusses individual and systemic lapses is remarkable, especially in a litigious environment where many individuals and organizations avoid discussing failure in any way (Cannon & Edmondson, 2001).

Interestingly, these findings may better inform the emerging construct of hyper-resilience. An important organizational construct aimed at understanding organizational response to crises (Dufresne & Clair, 2008), the research, to date, has described methods and tactics that an organization can use to respond to crises. Little work, however, has inquired about what organizational characteristics or cultures need to be in place to allow for hyper-resilient behaviors. From our West Point study, we see some evidence of a construct that we initially identified as being confidently vulnerable. In particular, we witness an organization that is confidently vulnerable in raising its mistakes for other stakeholders to view. Moreover, they purposefully try to extend the shelf life of these mistakes in an effort to promote better learning, which should help in future response to crises. This organizational stance of being confidently vulnerable is also seen as prior mistakes become part of the current training regimen such as the X/Y cases identified above. Thus we suggest that for an organization to build a hyper-resilient capacity, it must first be confidently vulnerable to frame mistakes, even severe ones such as major organizational crises, as learning opportunities. Without that framing, organizations will be handicapped in dealing with future organizational errors and, as a result, limit their hyper-resilience. Interestingly, hyper-resilience may require varying forms of organizational capacity and culture depending on the nature of the crises. For instance, crises may emerge from operational, safety, or ethical lapses. In the case described here, an ethical lapse seems to require this organizational mindset of confident vulnerability to endure and grow from the crisis.

Implications for Theory

We identify several tensions with which one organization’s ethical system must manage. Poole and Van de Ven (1989) identify tensions and paradox as possible sources of theory development. Our study uncovers tensions that are likely present in many organizations, and it is likely that a failure to grasp these and similar tensions has led to the lack of robust effectiveness of enacted ethical systems many researchers have found (Cleek & Leonard, 1998; Mathews, 1987). Scholars such as White and Lam (2000) have argued how an organization’s ethical system is an interaction of person, formal role, and culture; our contribution is to articulate the complexity within and between the cultural components, ethical code, informal norms, and social relationships that make up the ethical system.

We provide evidence that oftentimes these complex variables collide and conflict causing tension and a type of dissonance at the individual, team, and organizational levels. For ethical systems to work more effectively, it appears that some reconciliation of these tensions needs to occur. A major endogenous variable that appears a critical driver of this reconciliation is that of moral awareness at the individual level and a collective mind acutely aware of the interaction between ethical and cultural variables at the organizational level.

As we continued on the inductive and iterative process common to the qualitative research tradition, we began to see some theoretical support structures that enabled this reconciliation of these competing pressures. Offering some “greenshoots” of grounded theory, we propose and suggest that the support structures of leadership and organizational learning deserve more attention as levers for ethical system development and maintenance. Based on our study, we provide some theoretical assertions below.

A framework that seems to encourage management of these ethical tensions appears to be rooted in triple-loop learning (Nielsen, 1996). As Dufresne (2004) noted in his study of academic honor codes, it is easier to have a values-based (i.e., the second loop) conversation when it is embedded in testing the third loop of the culture or tradition systems. The question, for example, of whether an ethical system should work to present more ethical challenges rather than fewer hinges on competing values. On one hand, the system may value exposing its members to pluralism internally before being exposed to pluralism externally, while on the other hand, the system may value developmentally assisting its members navigate a rocky ethical coastline. At West Point, this values tension is resolved by looking at the third loop; by reflecting on the traditions and role of the organization, it becomes clear that the value of more temptation is preferable. It is better, the organization members reason, for them to struggle more now, when the stakes are relatively lower, so that the larger struggles later become more manageable. Of course, there is a leadership component embedded in this single to triple loop process. Specifically, leaders must model and allow for transparency. Moreover, they must encourage and reward intrusive, engaging, and challenging thinking. Without leadership support and modeling, it is unlikely that these double and triple loop learning processes could survive, let alone, prosper.

Implications for Practice

Our theory building exercise is not without prescriptive and pragmatic lessons. First, owing to our view of the ethics as systemic, it is important to remind managers of the systemic nature of their ethical practices, beliefs, and challenges. While it may be tempting for organizations to selectively see takeaways from the West Point case—such as only encouraging more temptation, or only engaging in environmental scanning—we see these as subsystems within the larger ethical system. To be effective, managers must reflect on their ethical systems systemically.

Second, regarding environmental scanning, it may be more than a competitive exercise as suggested by strategy scholars (Amankwah-Amoah & Debrah, 2010; Chen & Hambrick, 1995). Indeed, leaders and organizational policies can encourage environmental scanning to affect an ethical culture as well as a firm’s strategy. Not only does this prevent a certain level of insularity but it also exposes organizational members to ethical lapses and moral victories of others; the actions of a few could become the lessons and inspirations to many.

Third, organizational policies, to include organizational incentives, should spark creative, innovative, and counterfactual thinking. Importantly, the ability to reframe or see values through a series of different lenses allows the management of tensions which, to most, seem unmanageable. For instance, the integration of friendship, loyalty, and ethics is one such example; at West Point, cadets were encouraged to struggle with these tensions, and many cadets were able to do so by seeing the possibility of deeper friendship and interpersonal loyalty through ethics. As another example, a company for which one of the authors has consulted lists as two of its core values, “A passion for winning” and “Doing the right thing.” Informed by this study, our advice to this company was mindfully to bring to the surface the tensions inherent in holding both values concurrently, since tacitly assuming they could naturally coexist was unlikely to lead to a clear behavioral path informed by the ethical system. Furthermore, for individuals to engage in this type of thinking requires some level of decentralization of ethical decision making. In fact, this may be difficult as most organizations tend to centralize ethical functions under the domain of a Chief Ethics Officer or a Chief Legal Officer. In essence, at West Point, everyone is expected to be a Chief Ethics Officer. Ethical development was about more opportunities—not less, and these opportunities were pushed down to the lowest of levels within the organization.

Finally, organizations and their leaders create rites and rituals, many of which often occur early in the orientation and socialization process. A lesson learned here is that rites and rituals can be constructed in a way that positively influences, and even integrates, essential organizational values like teamwork, ethics, safety, and/or performance. Of course, this requires some purposeful, mindful forethought and proactive crafting of these events. It is our belief that many practitioners do not adequately consider or contemplate the role of rites and rituals in integrating and showcasing multiple values.

Limitations and Future Research

Given both the topic and the unique setting, a discussion of the limitations is appropriate. First, we should account for the possibility of institutional and/or researcher demand effects. This phenomenon is, perhaps, exacerbated here due to the social distance and rules orientation that West Point adopts. We must at least account for the notion that cadets leaned toward pleasing superiors or the research team. Guaranteeing anonymity and conducting interviews off campus when appropriate were mechanisms that we adopted to combat socially based institutional demand effects. Furthermore, evidence in the form of consistent responses between groups, responses which were unexpected to the interviewer, and reliance by the researchers on post hoc analysis of responses provides some evidence that demand effects are less likely (Zizzo, 2010). While these tactics are common, it is difficult to determine the efficacy of their use in our study.

Second, there is the issue of external validity. Namely, what portion of these findings, if any, could generalize to other organizations? This concern is not unique to the setting of West Point. Rather, a common refrain from ethicists is how exactly to generalize ethical thought, research, and training to the practical arena (Nielsen, 2010). West Point, itself, seems to recognize the challenges surrounding applying ethical training from West Point to the greater sample or population of the U.S. Army. Addressing both separate, but related, issues of transfer of training and external validity, we found that West Point employs two tools—one simple and another more complex. Specifically, West Point adopts an aggressive job rotation plan where U.S. Army officers and noncommissioned officers rotate in and out of the institution approximately every 3 years. On a relatively frequent occasion, U.S. Army officers from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are brought in for brief, plenary type lectures and presentations. Cadets are also rotated into the active Army several times in their cadet academic career for periods lasting up to 6 weeks. The interplay between the U.S. Army and its training and leadership center of West Point accomplishes two meaningful goals. Notably, it creates dialogue between individuals involved in the practice of ethics and those who study its application. Also, by allowing West Point cadets to enter, at least periodically, the U.S. Army, West Point can influence the greater organization of the U.S. Army by exposing it to the highest ideals of ethical thought and theory that cadets learn in their academic and leadership training. Besides job rotation, West Point has embraced technology to transfer operational, leadership, and ethics issues from the field back to West Point. This is done not only through video teleconferencing but also through shared web sites, wikis, and blogs. Hence, transfer of training and improving external validity are enhanced via an aggressive job rotation plan in conjunction with an investment in current web and social technologies.

Despite these efforts, the inferences surrounding external validity remain unexplored. This limitation, of course, provides ample launching points for future research. For instance, to our knowledge, there is no evidence that examines ethical failure rates of graduating West Point cadets into the Army. An even more sophisticated analysis could examine the attenuation of ethical training over time: Do West Point graduates make more ethical lapses the more removed they are, temporally, from West Point? Here, logical positivist, quantitative research could explore this research question empirically, and by so, add a longitudinal insight into the phenomenon. Likewise, future research can also explore how the phenomenon we saw concerning more senior cadets simultaneously manifesting different moral developmental stages about real-time issues might appear elsewhere as well as how future-self moral imagination affects moral development.

Beyond the scope of our bounded study, cross-case or cross organizational analysis is in order. Traditionally underused in qualitative research, cross-case analyses allow us to better understand commonalities and differences between samples or populations (Khan & VanWynsberghe, 2008). When done well, a research agenda focused on cross comparing this study to organizations in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors could inform scholars and practitioners, alike, to strategies, methods, and tactics applicable across settings. Indeed, inferences of external validity should always be tempered in qualitative research where sample sizes are low and contextual variables are many and complicated (Merriam, 2001; Pedhazur & Schmelkin, 1991; Seidman, 1998). Clearly, more work is needed here to move beyond face validity. It is our hope that other scholars and ethicists will seize on our promising, but exploratory, work here to better understand generalizability.

Conclusion

At West Point, there is a history over two centuries long of mindfully and purposefully maintaining an ethical system with the purpose of allowing its cadets to develop ethical leadership through applied practice. Over this long history, the components of the system have changed, as have the tensions within the system. The centrality of the ethical system provided rich data that allowed us to discern the most central aspects of the ethical system and how the organization managed the tensions within the ethical system.

Our findings are instructive for both scholars and managers alike. This study makes a contribution to the literature by exposing the multiple tensions at work in ethical systems and the ways in which these tensions might be managed. The tensions found in the West Point ethical system are common tensions organizations are likely to experience; learning how one might manage these tensions should be helpful for organizations intent on developing a thoughtful ethical system.

In conclusion, we feel that our study of one organization’s approach to develop, maintain, and manage an ethical system can be instructive. While no two organizations share the same traditions, values, mission, and environmental demands, our inductive study of the tensions that arise within one organization’s ethical system, and its management of those tensions, provides a framework for both scholars and practitioners of organizational ethics to consider.