The Ethical Perils of Personal, Communal Relations: A Language Perspective

Abstract

Most companies use codes of conduct, ethical training and regular communication to assure employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. This paper focuses on the type of language used in codes of conduct, and shows that impersonal language (“employees/members”) and personal, communal language (“we”) lead to different behaviors because they change how people perceive the group or organization they are part of. Using multiple methods, including lab- and field-based experiments (N = 1,443) and a large dataset of S&P firms (i.e., U.S. publicly traded, large companies that are part of Standard & Poor’s stock market index), we robustly demonstrate that personal, communal language (as compared to impersonal language) influences perceptions of a group’s warmth, which, in turn, increase levels of dishonesty among the members.

Keywords: Expressive Law; Dishonesty; Perception of Warmth; Communal Relation; Code of Conduct; Language Effects