Facing tough choices—your ethics or your job—is the stuff of heroes at work. Standing for something often puts our personal security at risk and tests our own integrity to the core. The Enron flameout exposed the moral and ethical dilemmas that put our personal integrity on the line, but situations like these are commonplace. None of this is new. The competition model, “What’s in it for me?” creates a workforce that believes they must become ruthless just to survive.

Researchers attribute much of the subtly insidious violence done to individuals at work to business executives’ view that their work is neither moral or immoral, but amoral—not caring about whether their acts are right or wrong. “Invisible economic market factors mysteriously justify and control decisions regardless of the harm done.” [Emphasis added.]

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