Unit 1 Assessment
In “What Was Volkswagen Thinking?,” Jerry Useem (2016) explains that organizations can be defined and shaped through communication. Useem discusses the technique of using a series of scripts and/or a company credo to help determine the behavior and decisions of employees. In the article, Useem presents both positive and negative examples of using a corporate script/credo.
In your response, explain how using a script/credo can guide organizational behavior. Based on what you have learned from reading Useems article, do you believe that having a corporate script/credo is a good way to guide organizational behavior? Explain.
Your response should be at least 500 words in length
2 6 J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 T H E A T L A N T I C
D I S P A T C H E S
I l l u s t r a t i o n b y J U S T I N R E N T E R I A
B U S I N E S S
What Was Volkswagen
Thinking?
On the origins of corporate eviland idiocy
BY J E R RY U S E E M
and then choosing to resuscitate the
credo as a living document.
Three years later, after reports
emerged of a deadly poisoning of Tylenol
capsules in Chicago-area stores, Johnson
& Johnsons reaction became the gold
standard of corporate crisis response.
But the companys swift decisionsto
remove every bottle of Tylenol capsules
from store shelves nationwide, publicly
warn people not to consume its product,
and take a $100 million losswerent
really decisions. They flowed more or
less automatically from the signal sent
three years earlier. Burke, in fact, was on
a plane when news of the poisoning broke.
By the time he landed, employees were
already ordering Tylenol off store shelves.
On the face of it, youd be hard-
pressed to find an episode less salient
to the emissions-cheating scandal at
Volkswagena company that, by con-
trast, seems intent on poisoning its own
O
n e day i n 1979, James
Burke, the chief execu-
tive of Johnson & Johnson,
summoned more than 20
of his key people into a room, jabbed his
finger at an internal document, and pro-
posed destroying it.
The document was hardly incrimi-
nating. Entitled Our Credo, its plain-
spoken list of principlesincluding a
higher duty to mothers, and all others
who use our productshad been a fix-
ture on company walls since 1943. But
Burke was worried that managers had
come to regard it as something like the
Magna Carta: an important historical
document, but hardly a tool for modern
decision making. If were not going to
live by it, lets tear it off the wall, Burke
told the group, using the weight of his
office to force a debate. And that is what
he got: a room full of managers debating
the role of moral duties in daily business,
product, name, and future. But although
the details behind VWs installation of
defeat devices in its vehicles are only
beginning to trickle out, the decision pro-
cess is very likely to resemble a bizarro
version of Johnson & Johnsons, with
opposite choices every step of the way.
The sociologist Diane Vaughan
coined the phrase the normalization of
deviance to describe a cultural drift in
which circumstances classified as not
okay are slowly reclassified as okay. In
the case of the Challenger space-shuttle
disasterthe subject of a landmark study
by Vaughandamage to the crucial
O-rings had been observed after previous
shuttle launches. Each observed instance
of damage, she found, was followed by a
sequence in which the technical devia-
tion of the [O-rings] from performance
predictions was redefined as an accept-
able risk. Repeated over time, this
behavior became routinized into what
organizational psychologists call
a script. Engineers and managers
developed a definition of the situation that
allowed them to carry on as if nothing was
wrong. To clarify: They were not merely
acting as if nothing was wrong. They
believed it, bringing to mind Orwells
concept of doublethink, the method by
which a bureaucracy conceals evil not
only from the public but from itself.
If that comparison sounds over-
wrought, consider the words of Denny
Gioia, a management professor at Penn
State who, in the early 1970s, was the
coordinator of product recalls at Ford.
At the time, the Ford Pinto was show-
ing a tendency to explode when hit
from behind, incinerating passengers.
Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to
recall the cara fact that, when revealed
to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a
bomb. Before I went to Ford I would
have argued strongly that Ford had an
ethical obligation to recall, he wrote
in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17
years after hed left the company. I now
argue and teach that Ford had an ethical
obligation to recall. But, while I was there,
I perceived no strong obligation to recall
and I remember no strong ethical over-
tones to the case whatsoever.
What, Gioia the professor belatedly
T H E A T L A N T I C J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 2 7
asked, had Gioia the auto executive
been thinking? The best answer, he con-
cluded, is that he hadnt been. Execu-
tives are bombarded with information.
To ease the cognitive load, they rely on
a set of unwritten scripts imported from
the organization around them. You could
even define corporate culture as a collec-
tion of scripts. Scripts are undoubtedly
efficient. Managers dont have to mud-
dle through each new problem afresh,
Gioia wrote, because the mode of han-
dling such problems has already been
worked out in advance. But therein lies
the danger. Scripts can be flawed, and
grow more so over time, yet they discour-
age active analysis. Based on the infor-
mation Gioia had at the time, the Pinto
didnt fit the criteria for recall that his
team had already agreed upon (a clearly
documentable pattern of failure of a spe-
cific part). No further thought necessary.
Sometimes a jarring piece of evi-
dence does intrude, forcing a conscious
reassessment. For Gioia, it was the mo-
ment he saw the charred hulk of a Pinto
at a company depot known internally
as The Chamber of Horrors. The
revulsion it evoked gave him pause. He
called a meeting. But nothing changed.
After the usual round of discussion
about criteria and justification for recall,
everyone voted against recommending
recallincluding me.
The most troubling thing, says
Vaughan, is the way scripts expand like
an elastic waistband to accommodate
more and more divergence. Morton-
Thiokol, the NASA contractor charged
with engineering the O-rings, requested
a teleconference on the eve of the fatal
Challenger launch. After a previous
launch, its engineers had noticed O-ring
damage that looked different from dam-
age theyd seen before. Suspecting that
cold was a factor, the engineers saw the
near-freezing forecast and made a no
launch recommendationsomething
they had never done before. But the data
they faxed to NASA to buttress their case
were the same data they had earlier used
to argue that the space shuttle was safe to
fly. NASA pounced on the inconsistency.
Embarrassed and unable to overturn the
script they themselves had built in the
preceding years, Morton-Thiokols brass
buckled. The no launch recommenda-
tion was reversed to launch.
Its like losing your virginity, a
NASA teleconference participant later
told Vaughan. Once youve done it,
you cant go back. If you try, you face
a credibility spiral: Were you lying then or
are you lying now?
B
u t b A c k t o V o l k S wA g e N.
You cannot unconsciously install a
defeat device into hundreds of thou-
sands of cars. You need to be sneaky, and
thus deliberate. To understand that be-
havior, we have to turn to a more select
subset of examples, such as the Air Force
brake scandal of 1968, when B. F. Good-
rich built an aircraft brake that many
employees knew would fail. When it was
tested at Edwards Air Force Base, the
brake melted. As in, became molten.
Like Volkswagens actions, this
would seem an act of madness, pure and
simple. (Its almost like they painted
a bulls-eye on themselves, Joseph
Badaracco, an ethics professor at Har-
vard Business School, says of VW.) But
the final decision to deceive was, on an
individual level, rationalthe logical
end to a long sequence.
It started, as Volks-
wagens problems appar-
ently did, with a promise
that should not have been
made. Goodrich, which was
desperate to regain an Air
Force contractors favor as
a supplier after a previous
delivery of shoddy brakes,
promised a brake that was
ultracheap and ultralight. Too light, in fact.
When first tried out in a simulation at the
companys test lab, the prototype glowed
cherry red and spewed incendiary bits of
metal. But by the time a young engineer
discovered that the source of the prob-
lem was the design itself (a more senior
engineer had gotten his math wrong),
the wheels were quite literally in motion.
Brake components from other suppli-
ers were arriving. The required redesign
would wreck the promised timetable. The
young engineer was told to keep testing.
The brake kept failing. During the
13th set of tests, an all-out effort was
made to nurse the brake through the
required 50 simulated landings. Accord-
ing to Kermit Vandivier, a data analyst at
the test lab who later testified at a Senate
hearing, fans were brought in for cooling.
Warped components were machined
back into shape between stops. Test
instrumentation was deliberately mis-
calibrated. But even these cheats werent
enough. In one simulation, the wheel
rolled some three miles before coming
to a stop. Nevertheless, Vandivier and
several colleagues were told to prepare
a report showing that the brake qualified.
The only question left for me to
decide, Vandivier later wrote, was
whether or not I would become a party
to the fraud. Refusal would mean losing
his job. Hed be 42, with seven children, a
new house, and a clear conscience. But,
he wrote, bills arent paid with per-
sonal satisfaction, nor house payments
with ethical principles. He spent nearly
a month crafting the falsified report.
(The Air Force eventually asked to see
the raw test data. Vandivier resigned
and became a newspaper reporter.)
This sequence of events fits a pattern
that appears and reappears in corporate-
misconduct cases, begin-
ning with the fantastic
commitments made from
on high. NASA officials had
promised a routine and
economical shuttle pro-
gram that would launch 60
times a yeara target that
proved hopelessly optimis-
tic. Fords president, Lee
Iacocca, had wanted a car
weighing no more than 2,000 pounds and
costing no more than $2,000 to be ready
for production in 25 months. To hasten
the process, production equipment was
developed concurrently with the car it-
self; repositioning the Pintos gas tank
would have required a redesign of the fac-
tory equipment, too. All of which placed
personnel in a position of extreme strain.
We know what strain does to people.
Even without it, they tend to under-
estimate the probability of future bad
events. Put them under emotional
stress, some research suggests, and this
The O-ring
engineers
were not
merely
acting as if
nothing was
wrong. They
believed it.
D I S P A T C H E S
2 8 J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 T H E A T L A N T I C I l l u s t r a t i o n b y M A R C O G O R A N
tendency gets amplified. People will
favor decisions that preempt short-
term social discomfort even at the cost
of heightened long-term risk. Faced
with the immediate certainty of a bosss
wrath or the distant possibility of blow-
back from a faceless agency, many will
focus mostly on the former.
This reaction isnt excusable. But it is
predictable. What James Burke, Johnson
& Johnsons CEO, did was anticipate the
possible results of these pressures, well
before they built up. He shared Henry
Jamess imagination of disaster. And
its why he introduced, if you will, a set of
counterscripts. It was a conscious eff ort
to tinker with the unconscious criteria
by which decisions at his company were
made. The result was an incremental
descent into integ rity, a slide toward
soundness, and the normalization of ref-
erencing Our Credo in situations that
might otherwise have seemed devoid of
ethical content.
What we know of Ferdinand Pich,
Volkswagens chairman before the
scandal, is that he was no James Burke.
At a 2008 corruption trial that sent one
VW executive to jail, Pich referred to
alleged widespread use of VW funds on
prostitutes as mere irregularities, and
chided a lawyer for mispronouncing
Lamborghini. (Those who cant aff ord
one should say it properly were his pre-
cise words.) This was around the time
the emissions cheating began.
Culture starts at the top, a business-
man recently said in an interview with
the Association of Certified Fraud
Exam iners. But it doesnt start at the
top with pretty statements. Employees
will see through empty rhetoric and will
emulate the nature of top-management
decision making A robust code of
conduct can be emasculated by one
action of the CEO or CFO. The speaker
was Andrew Fastow, the former CFO of
Enron, who spent more than fi ve years
in federal prison. He got one thing right:
Decisions may be the product of culture.
But culture is the product of decisions.
Jerry Useem has covered business and
economics for The New York Times,
Fortune, and other publications.
T H E S T U D I E S :
[1] Jay and Janschewitz,
Filling the Emotion Gap in
Linguistic Theory (Theoreti-
cal Linguistics, Oct. 2007)
[2] Zile and Stephens, Swear-
ing as Emotional Language
(presented at the British
Psychological Societys annual
conference in Birmingham,
England, 2014)
[3] Stephens et al., Swearing
as a Response to Pain
(NeuroReport, Aug. 2009)
[4] Stephens and Umland,
Swearing as a Response to
Pain: Eff ect of Daily Swearing
Frequency (The Journal of
Pain, Dec. 2011)
[5] Daly et al., Expletives as
Solidarity Signals in FTAs on
the Factory Floor (Journal of
Pragmatics, May 2004)
[6] Baruch and Jenkins, Swear-
ing at Work and Permissive
Leadership Culture (Leadership
and Organizational Develop-
ment Journal, Oct. 2007)
[7] Johnson and Lewis,
Perceptions of Swearing in
the Work Setting (Communi-
cation Reports, July 2010)
[8] Rassin and Van Der
Heijden, Appearing Credible?
Swearing Helps! (Psychology,
Crime & Law, June 2005)
[9] Scherer and Sagarin,
Indecent Influence (Social
Influence, June 2006)
I
N 2013, Martin
Scorseses darkly
comic depiction of
white-collar crime and
hedonism, The Wolf of
Wall Street, claimed the
title for most uses of fuck
ever in a Hollywood fea-
ture film. Over the course
of three hours, the films
characters utter the
word and its derivatives
more than 500 times.
They deploy it as a noun,
a verb, an adjective, an
interjection, and an infix
(thats an aff ix inserted
inside a wordas in,
absofucking lutely). They
swear in the company
of friends, colleagues,
and adversaries, in mo-
ments of anger, excite-
ment, and awe.
If research is any
guide, this surfeit is not
the result of a limited
vocabulary or a lack of
imagination. Psycho-
linguists have remarked
that taboo words
communicate emotional
information more eff ec-
tively than non-taboo
words and allow us
to vent anger without
Zealand suggests social
benefits to swearing. The
liberal use of four-letter
words allowed factory
workers there to build
solidarity and to bond
over shared frustra-
tions[5]. Researchers
found similar eff ects in
off ice settings, where
witty uses of coarse,
casual profanity
boosted morale and
lowered stress among
low-level workers[6].
That said, if you prefer
scaling the corporate
ladder to making friends,
you may want to avoid
colorful language. In one
experiment, participants
said they would perceive
a co-worker who swore
in a formal meeting to be
incompetent[7].
Whether or not curs-
ing is completely profes-
sional, it can be persua-
sive. Fictitious perpetrator
and victim testimonies
peppered with profan-
ity were rated as more
believable than those
without curse words, one
study found[8]. Similarly,
political speeches that
included a mild expletive
(damn) swayed already
sympathetic listeners
more than those without
obscenity, perhaps be-
cause they were thought
to demonstrate passion.
(Cursing had the opposite
eff ect on skeptical audi-
ences, who found it crass
and off -putting.)[9]
In short: Swear, and
swear often! But not if
you want a promotion.
Or if youre prone to
injury. Unless youre try-
ing to prove a frigging
point.
getting physical[1].
Which might explain why
were better at swearing
when were fired up. After
playing violent video
games for 10 minutes,
participants in one study
now under peer review
were able to write down
significantly more swear
words than those who
had played a (presum-
ably less exhilarating)
golf video game[2].
Other studies point
to further benefits of
well-timed profanity.
For one thing, cursing
appears to help you en-
dure pain. When under-
graduates repeated
a strong swear word,
they were able to keep
a hand submerged in icy
water about 40 seconds
longer, on average, than
when they repeated a
neutral word. They also
rated their pain as less
intense[3]. Dont toss
your Tylenol just yet,
though: A follow-up
study noted that people
who swear habitually
experience less relief[4].
Research out of New
Curses!
How to get ahead by swearing
BY S T E P H A N I E H AY E S
S T U D Y O F S T U D I E S
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