“The inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking”

Within the treasure trove of H.L. Mencken’s sayings, this definition of “conscience” may be my favorite.  And, various studies have indeed shown that the sense that somebody may be watching can help promote ethical behavior.  Among these are  experiments exposing individuals to “eyespots” –  drawings which create a vague sense of being watched, even among those who know as a factual matter that they aren’t being seen. (See, e.g., this study, showing that exposure to eyespots can promote generosity.)

While actually deploying eyespots around the workplace is hardly a viable option for most companies, various technological advances offer not only the appearance of being watched but the actuality of it.  Such monitoring technologies can be particularly promising for promoting compliance by parts of a workforce for whom supervision is relatively remote – which is often the case for sales people.

For two other risk-related reasons, sales people can be a logical choice for C&E monitoring:

– Their incentives may not align well with those of their respective companies – a “moral hazard” condition.  (Indeed, in a risk assessment interview I conducted last week, the interviewee responded to a question about conflicts of interest by saying – only somewhat in jest – that the whole company sales force had such conflicts.)

– Sales people tend to be in a position to cause legal/ethical violations – e.g., corruption, collusion and fraud – much more than the average employee at a company.

But, while the case for monitoring sales people is strong as a general matter, obviously not all monitoring strategies are equally effective.  According to a paper published in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Business Research, “Does transparency influence the ethical behavior of salespeople?” John E. Cicala, Alan J. Bush, Daniel L. Sherrell and George D. Deitz (rentable on Deep Dyve): “it is not the perception of visibility that drives sales persons behavior, but rather the perception of the likelihood of negative consequences resulting from management use of knowledge and information gained from technologically increased visibility.”

Of course, these results – based on an on-line survey which is described in the paper – presumably won’t surprise any C&E professionals. (Nor, likely, would they have impressed Mencken, who also said: “A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas” – although I should add that that’s just another chance to quote the great man – not a reflection of my view of this paper.) But, as with much of the social science research discussed in this blog, having data to back up what is intuitively known may be useful, particularly when seeking to make C&E reforms in a company that are being resisted.

Most relevant here is the often-contentious issue of how open a company is with its discipline for violations (meaning not just of sales persons but any employee).  While C&E professionals typically understand that true “public hangings” – i.e., full identification of individual transgressions and transgressors – can be undesirable for all sorts of reasons, there is still a lot that their respective companies can do in a general way to show that   negative consequences do exist for breaches of C&E  standards. Hopefully, this new research can help C&E professionals make such a case.