Why Good Employees Do Bad Things

Kellogg’s Maryam Kouchaki on understanding — and avoiding — ethical breakdowns.

- Laura W. Geller

For outsiders observing a scandal at a company or organization, the situation often seems implausible or incomprehensible. How did leaders let it happen? Why did so many people go along with the wrongdoing? And why did it go on for so long?

The view from inside a scandal-plagued organization is considerably different. We know that, in business as in life, good people sometimes do bad things — whether it’s a small lie or a giant fraud, a one-time act of dishonesty or an ongoing deception. Maryam Kouchaki, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, has made understanding this phenomenon a prominent theme of her academic career. After studying physics as an undergrad in Tehran, and earning an MBA along the way, Kouchaki came to the U.S. in 2007 to pursue a Ph.D. in organizational behavior at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, she joined Kellogg in 2014.

Kouchaki studies the causes of unethical behavior, with a particular focus on how psychology and human nature come into play. She’s found that anxiety-inducing music makes people more likely to cheat, for example, and that cheaters are more likely to have fuzzy memories of their misdeeds. But she’s not simply interested in documenting and diagnosing our failings. In Kouchaki’s view, we humans may be hardwired to react and behave in certain ways that may not always make us proud, but we are by no means a lost cause. And so she looks for interventions that can help people behave morally and become emboldened to speak up when they witness wrongdoing.