The oldest conflict of interest

Many years ago a client being vetted for a high-ranking post asked me if a question about prior ethical violations required him to disclose a long since concluded extramarital affair. I replied that this seemed beyond the scope of the question, and I would give the same answer if asked today. But a recent paper suggests a different way of looking at this area.

In “Personal infidelity and professional conduct in 4 settings”,  John M. Griffin and Samuel Kruger, both of the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, and Gonzalo Maturana of the Goizueta Business School, Emory University: “study the connection between personal and professional behavior by introducing usage of a marital infidelity website as a measure of personal conduct. Police officers and financial advisors who use the infidelity website are significantly more likely to engage in professional misconduct. Results are similar for US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defendants accused of white-collar crimes, and companies with chief executive officers (CEOs) or chief financial officers (CFOs) who use the website are more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct. The relation is not explained by a wide range of regional, firm, executive and cultural variables. These findings suggest that personal and workplace behavior are closely related.”

The ramifications of these findings indeed  seem significant. Included is the negative implication for behavioral ethics: “our findings suggest that personal and professional lives are connected and cut against the common view that ethics are predominantly situational. This supports the classical view that virtues such as honesty and integrity influence a person’s thoughts and actions across diverse contexts and has potentially important implications for corporate recruiting and codes of conduct. A possible implication of our findings is that the recent focus on eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace may have the auxiliary effect of reducing fraudulent workplace activity.”

For more on the connection between personal and professional ethics see this prior post.