Organizational Culture

Developing and deploying emerging technologies in an ethical way requires ethical organizations. This means having an organizational culture that supports ethics: having an ethical purpose, ethical values, awareness of ethical impacts, and standards of professional ethics.

To build an ethical culture requires understanding of the current culture of the organization as well as what steps need to be taken to achieve an organizational culture that prizes ethical behavior.

What is Organizational Culture?

An organization’s culture encompasses its values, principles, and practices that guide its members’ actions. It is shaped by the organization’s leadership, governance structure, policies, and its various stakeholders. An organization’s culture is more than its mission statement — it’s the result of authentic and consistent conduct and behavior. An organization’s culture comprises a set of shared assumptions that guide individuals’ actions and specify appropriate behavior in different organizational contexts. Or, put another way, organizational culture is "the way we do things in this organization."

Ethical culture refers to that aspect of an organization’s culture that supports the organization and its members in consistently doing the right thing. Key elements of ethical culture include:

• An organization’s purpose.

• The ways in which the organization rewards ethical behavior.

• The organization's degree of sensitivity to ethical issues.

• The organization's capacity to engage in ethical deliberation.

• The accountability practices adopted and followed by the organization.

If organizational culture is about "the way we do things in this organization," then ethical culture is about "the way we approach questions about 'what's the right thing to do?' in this organization."

Why is Organizational Culture Important?

An organization’s culture is inextricably intertwined with its performance. As we have seen, data- driven organizations face enormous responsibilities as a result of their powers and capacities. Many vital aspects of how organizations behave—from how they respond to challenges and crises, how they adapt to change, and how effectively they advance technological and social progress—are informed by their culture.

An organization’s culture informs the way in which product decisions are made, which can have a huge impact on what products are created, launched, and how they are ultimately used. For example, the attitude of "move fast and break things" has resulted in a kind of corporate culture in which questions like "Can we build this product?" took priority over questions like "Should we build this product?" Imagine if we applied the "move fast and break things" mantra to the development of autonomous weapons systems.

Some cultures tolerate, or even encourage, misconduct. One of the most common problems is a kind of corporate culture that focuses exclusively on profits. When this comes at the cost of customers’, suppliers’, or other stakeholders’ interests, this can have disastrous consequences.

For example, the global oil company BP suffered several crises as a result of deficiencies in corporate culture. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest environmental disaster in history, and it cost BP more than $65 billion in total. In previous years, BP had suffered several smaller incidents, including an explosion in a refinery in Texas in 2005, which killed 15 employees and injured 200, in addition to other fatal accidents and spills, to which BP failed to respond. BP’s disregard for worker safety, legal requirements, and social and environmental concerns was a concomitant of its exclusive focus on profit. Had BP taken safety procedures, governance, and ethical culture more seriously, lethal incidents and large-scale disasters might have been avoided.

Another case where deficiencies in corporate culture had lethal consequences is that of Boeing. Shortcomings in Boeing’s company culture let to fatal shortcomings concerning the safety of its planes. Boeing’s culture rewarded efficiency, and the containment of costs, over safety. This ultimately resulted in the design of unsafe pilot software, which in turn caused several planes to crash—including the crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX airplanes in 2018 and 2019, which caused the deaths of 346 people. After the crashes, many stories emerged of employees covering up deficiencies and hiding problems from regulators, as Boeing was trying to evade scrutiny and prevent its employees from speaking up. Messages that the systems were faulty had emerged as early as 2016. Had Boeing’s culture encouraged responsible behavior, and prioritized safety over profit, those deadly crashes might have been prevented.

What cases like these illustrate is that, even if harms are not intentional, having adequate ethical practices, governance, and management systems in place is vital to preventing harms. In some cases, the behaviors encouraged by a company’s culture can make the difference between life and death. Culture is not only key to promoting behavior in keeping with ethical standards and legal obligations. It can also save lives.

A healthy organizational culture helps employees act in accordance with basic moral principles and makes it significantly less likely that people will violate legal and regulatory standards. A company’s culture can make a significant difference to how likely people are to do the right thing.