In the article “Why Ethical People Make Unethical Decisions” by Ron Carucci, he talks about the phenomenon of seemingly ethical people making unethical decisions. To me this is an interesting topic, because I feel like a lot of people, myself included, automatically assume that people who do bad business, such as committing fraud or something of that nature, are horrible people. In reality, however, and the article hits on this, they are usually normal people like you and me. This phenomenon made me think about college sports before the NIL era. Schools all over the country were committing recruiting violations, whether through paying players or incentivizing them in another way, and many were caught. Even NC State, the school I attend now and grew up cheering for, got in trouble for such recruiting violations. This is a clear example of ethical people, or in this case, ethical universities, making unethical choices.

              One of the biggest reasons, in my opinion, that ethical people make unethical decisions, especially when they are in positions of power, is due to the unhealthy amount of pressure to succeed. The article states something similar, saying that, “Significant research from Harvard Business School suggests unfettered goal setting can encourage people to make compromising choices in order to reach targets, especially if those targets seem unrealistic.”  (Why Ethical People Make Unethical Choices, pg 3). Connecting back to my connection to college sports, the intense pressure for teams to succeed led to programs illegally trying to recruit players. In the business world, if a manager and his team are given unrealistic sales goals, they might be tempted to cheat the system in some way to reach these.

              Another connection I made with this was with the article we read about the Titan submersible and OceanGate. Their CEO was most likely not a horrible person; however, he made very unethical decisions while trying to get his expedition to succeed.

              There are many pressures and reasons why ethical people make unethical decisions; however, we should all try and act with integrity and morals when making decisions in any aspect of our lives, and especially in a leadership role.

Carucci, R. (2016, December 16). Why Ethical People Make Unethical Choices. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/12/why-ethical-people-make-unethical-choices